CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Umberto Eco
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter One: ON BEING
1.1 Semiotics and the Something
1.2 An unnatural problem
1.3 Why is there being?
1.4 How we talk about being
1.5 The aporia of being in Aristotle
1.6 The duplication of being
1.7 The questioning of the poets
1.8 A model of world knowledge
1.9 On the possibility that being might abscond
1.10 The resistances of being
1.11 The sense of the continuum
1.12 Positive conclusions
Chapter Two: KANT, PEIRCE, AND THE PLATYPUS
2.1 Marco Polo and the unicorn
2.2 Peirce and the black ink
2.3 Kant, trees, stones, and horses
2.4 Perceptual judgments
2.5 The schema
2.6 And the dog?
2.7 The platypus
2.8 Pierce reinterpreted
2.8.1 The Ground, qualia, and primary iconism
2.8.2 The lower threshold of primary iconism
2.8.3 Perceptual judgment
2.9 The grain
Chapter Three: COGNITIVE TYPES AND NUCLEAR CONTENT
3.1 From Kant to cognitivism
3.2 Perception and semiosis
3.3 Montezuma and the horses
3.3.1 The Cognitive Type (CT)
3.3.1.1 The recognition of tokens
3.3.1.2 Naming and felicitous reference
3.3.1.3 The CT and the black box
3.3.2 From CT toward Nuclear Content (NC)
3.3.2.1 Instructions for identification
3.3.2.2 Instructions for retrieval
3.3.3 Molar Content (MC)
3.3.4 NC, MC, and concepts
3.3.5 On referring
3.4 Semiosic primitives
3.4.1 Semiosic primitives and interpretation
3.4.2 On categories
3.4.3 Semiosic primitives and verbalization
3.4.4 Qualia and interpretation
3.4.5 The CTs and the image as “schema”
3.4.6 “Affordances”
3.5 Empirical cases and cultural cases
3.5.1 The story of the archangel Gabriel
3.5.2 CT and NC as zones of common competence
3.6 From type to token or vice versa?
3.7 The CT archipelago
3.7.1 Types vs. basic categories
3.7.2 Tiny Tim’s Story
3.7.3 Quadruped oysters
3.7.4 CTs and prototypes
3.7.4.1 Stereotypes and prototypes
3.7.4.2 Some misunderstandings regarding prototypes
3.7.4.3 The mysterious Dyirbal
3.7.5 Other types
3.7.6 If on a Winter’s Night a Driver
3.7.7 Physiognomic types by individuals
3.7.8 CTs for formal individuals
3.7.9 Recognizing SC2
3.7.10 Some open problems
3.7.11 From the public CT to that of the artist
Chapter Four: THE PLATYPUS BETWEEN DICTIONARY AND ENCYCLOPEDIA
4.1 Mountains and MOUNTAINS
4.2 Files and directories
4.3 Wild categorization
4.4 Indelible properties
4.5 The real story of the platypus
4.5.1 Watermole or duck-billed platypus
4.5.2 Mammae without nipples
4.5.3 A la recherche de I’oeuf perdu
4.6 Contracting
4.6.1 Eighty years of negotiations
4.6.2 Hjelmslev vs. Peirce
4.6.3 Where does the amorphous continuum lie?
4.6.4 Vanville
4.7 Contract and meaning
4.7.1 Meaning of the terms and sense of the texts
4.7.2 Meaning and the text
Chapter Five: NOTES ON REFERRING AS CONTRACT
Can we refer to all cats?
Referring to horses
The true story of the sarkiapone
Are there closed white boxes?
The Divine Mind as e-mail
From the Divine Mind to the Intention of the Community
Quid pro quo and negotiations
The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and the brothers Hyde
Is Jones mad?
What does Nancy want?
Who died on the fifth of May?
Impossible objects
The identity of the Vasa
On Ahab’s other leg
Ich liebe Dich
Chapter Six: ICONISM AND HYPOICON
6.1 The debate on iconism
6.2 Not a debate between madmen
6.3 The arguments of the sixties
6.4 Dead ends
6.5 Likeness and similarity
6.6 Outlines
6.7 Surrogate stimuli
6.8 Back to the discourse
6.9 Seeing and drawing Saturn
6.10 Prostheses
6.11 More on mirrors
6.12 Chains of mirrors and television
6.13 Rethinking painting
6.14 Recognition
6.15 Alpha and beta mode: a catastrophe point?
6.16 From perceptual likeness to conceptual similarities
6.17 The Mexican on a bicycle
Endnotes
Works Cited
Index
Copyright
Umberto Eco is internationally renowned as a philosopher, historian and literary critic. The Name of the Rose was his first novel and became a bestseller throughout the world. He has written two other novels, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before, and published collections of essays, including Faith in Fakes, and How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays. A professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, he lives in Milan.
How much do our perceptions of things depend on our cognitive ability, and how much on our linguistic resources? Where, and how, do these two questions meet? Umberto Eco undertakes a series of idiosyncratic and typically brilliant explorations, starting from the perceived data of common sense, from which flow an abundance of ‘stories’ or fables, often with animals as protagonists, to expound a clear critique of Kant, Heidegger and Peirce. And as a beast designed specifically to throw spanners in the works of cognitive theory, the duckbilled platypus naturally takes centre stage.
Also available in Vintage
Umberto Eco
THE NAME OF THE ROSE
‘Imagine a medieval castle run by the Benedictines, with cellarists, herbalists, gardeners, young novices. One after the other half a dozen monks are found murdered in the most bizarre of ways. A learned Franciscan who is sent to solve the mystery finds himself involved in the frightening events . . . a sleuth’s pursuit of the truth behind the mystery also involves the pursuit of meaning – in words, symbols, ideas, every conceivable sign the visible universe contains . . . Umberto Eco has written a novel – his first – and it has become a literary event’
New York Times Book Review
‘The late medieval world, teetering on the edge of discoveries and ideas that will hurl it into one more recognisably like ours, its thought, its lifestyle, its intense political and ecclesiastical intrigues . . . its steamy and seductive currents of heresy of thought . . . all these are evoked with a force and a wit that are breathtaking’
Financial Times
Also available in Vintage
Umberto Eco
HOW TO TRAVEL WITH A SALMON
and other essays
‘Deliriously funny’
Sunday Times
Tackling topics as diverse as the coffee pot from hell, eating on an aeroplane, how not to use a cellular phone and recognising porn movies, Umberto Eco guides us with all his customary wit and brilliance through the complexities of the modern world.
‘One finds oneself leaping as merrily from page to page as over the stepping-stones of a river’
Sunday Times
Also available in Vintage
Umberto Eco
THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE
‘Every age gets the classic it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before . . . We are left energized, exhilarated by the sheer sensory excitement of the music’s telling’
New York Times Book Review
It is 1643. Roberto, a young nobleman, survives war, the Bastille and shipwreck to travel to a remote Pacific island on the date meridian. There he waits, separated from the island of the day before by treacherous reefs. If he could reach it, time, and his misfortunes, might be reversed. But first he must learn to swim . . .
‘No comparable book has ever existed . . . the exuberance of the narrative and the sheer sumptuousness of the language’
Sunday Times
Also available in Vintage
Umberto Eco
FAITH IN FAKES
Travels in Hyperreality
‘There is enough liveliness here, and enough imaginative suggestiveness, to keep the reader furiously entertained’
Sunday Times
Holography, wax museums, the secret meaning of sports, Superman and the intellectual effects of over-tight jeans are just a few of the subjects covered in this collection of witty, entertaining and thought-provoking delights.
‘A scintillating collection by one of the most influential thinkers of our time’
Los Angeles Times
A Theory of Semiotics
The Role of the Reader
The Name of the Rose
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Faith in Fakes
How to Travel with a Salmon
Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages
The Aesthetics of Aquinas
The Open Work
The Aesthetics of Chaosmos
Foucault’s Pendulum
Misreadings
The Island of the Day Before
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
FOR CHILDREN, WITH EUGENIO CARMI
The Bomb and the General
The Three Astronauts
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.
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 faced not only with a terminus ad quem but also with a terminus a quo. It must ask itself not only “To what do we refer when we talk, and with what degree of reliability?” (a problem certainly worthy of consideration) but also “What makes us talk?”
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-us—and 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.
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.
Why is there being rather than nothing? Because there is.8
This is an answer to be taken with the maximum seriousness; it is not a bon mot. The very fact that we can pose the question (which we could not pose if there were nothing, not even the posers of the question) means that the condition of every question is that being exists. Being is not a problem for common sense (or, rather, common sense does not see it as a problem), because it is the condition for common sense itself. At the beginning of De Veritate (1.1) Aquinas says: “Illud autem quod primum intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, et in quo omnes conceptiones resolvit, est ens.”fn1 That there is something is the first, most obvious, and best known thing conceived by our intellect, and all the rest follows. That is, we could not think if not by starting from the (implicit) principle that we are thinking something. Being is the horizon, or the amniotic fluid, in which our thought naturally moves—or, rather, since in Aquinas’s view the intellect presides over the first apprehension of things, it is that in which our first perceptual efforts move.
There would be being even if we found ourselves in a Berkeleyan situation, if we were nothing other than a screen upon which God projects a world that does not exist in reality. Even in that case there would be our act, even if it were fallacious, of perceiving that which is not (or which is only insofar as it is perceived by us), and there would be we as perceiving subjects (and, according to Berkeley’s hypothesis, there would be a God that tells us what is not). There would therefore be enough being to satisfy even the most anxious of ontologists. There is always something, since there is someone capable of wondering why there is something instead of nothing.
All this should immediately make clear that the problem of being cannot be reduced to the problem of the reality of the world. Whether what we call the outside World, or the Universe, is or is not, or whether it is the effect of a malign spirit, does not in any way affect the primary evidence that there is “something” somewhere (even if it were no more than a res cogitans that realized it was cogitating).
But there’s no need to wait for Descartes. There is a fine page in Avicenna who—after having said on many occasions that an entity is that which is conceived first of all, and that it may not be commented upon except through its name, because it is the first principle of every other comment, and that reason recognizes it without having to fall back on a definition, because entity has no definition, genus, or differentia, and that nothing is more known than it is—invites us to make an experiment that suggests he was not unfamiliar with certain Oriental drugs:
Let us suppose that one of us has suddenly been created, and is perfect. But he is blindfolded and cannot see external things. He has been created gliding through the air, or, better, in the void, so that he might not suffer the shock of air resistance. His limbs are separated, they neither meet nor touch. He meditates and wonders if his existence is proved. Without any doubt, he would state that he existed: despite the fact that this does not prove the existence of either his hands or his feet, or his insides, or his heart, or brain, or any other external thing, he would say he existed, without establishing whether he had a length, a breadth, or a depth . . . (Philippe 1975: 1–9)
Therefore there is being because we can pose the question of being, and this being comes before every question, and therefore before every answer and every definition. It is known that the modern objection that Western metaphysics—with its obsession about being—springs only from within a discourse based on the syntactic structures of Indo-European, and that is to say on a language that requires the subject-copula-predicate structure for all judgments (insofar as, as the eighteenth-century constructors of perfect languages did their utmost to propose, even sentences like God is or The horse gallops can always be resolved as God is existent and The horse is galloping). But the experience of being is implicit in the first cry emitted by a baby that has just emerged from its mother’s womb, to greet or take account of the something that manifests itself to it as the horizon, and in the baby’s seeking the breast with its lips. The phenomenon of primary indexicality shows us reaching out toward something (and it is irrelevant whether this something is really there or whether we posit that it is through our reaching out; it is even irrelevant whether it is we who are reaching out—there would be a reaching out in any case).
Being is id quod primum intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, as if we had always been on that horizon, and perhaps the fetus is aware of being while it still floats in the uterus. Obscurely, it senses being as quasi notissimum (or, better, as the only known thing).
There is no need to wonder why there is being; it is a luminous evidence. Which does not mean that it cannot seem dazzling, terrible, unbearable, lethal—and as a matter of fact it seems that way to many people. Asking questions about its foundations is illusion or weakness and reminds one of the person who, asked if she believed in God, replied, “No, I believe in something much greater.” Being is its own fundamental principle, and we run into this inescapable fact every time we ask ourselves questions about it. Asking questions about the foundations of being is like asking questions about the foundations of the foundations, and then about the foundations of the foundations of the foundations, in an infinite regression: when, exhausted, we stop, we are once more and already at the very foundations of our question.9
If anything, the question why is there being rather than nothing conceals another source of disquiet, which regards the existence of God. But first comes the proof of being, then the question of God. The question “Who has made all this, who keeps it in being?” follows the act of recognizing the evidence that there is something, an evidence so well known that it strikes us as being already organized within the cohort of the entities. It seems undeniable that even animals possess evidence of being despite the fact they are incapable of asking themselves the question that follows from it, an Deus sit. Aquinas was to reply to this in a summa appropriately called “Theologica.” But first comes the discussion on the De ente et essentia.
Being is even before it is talked about. But we can take it from irrepressible evidence and transform it into a problem (which awaits an answer) only insofar as we talk about it. The first opening to being is a sort of ecstatic experience, albeit in the most materialistic sense of the term, but as long as we remain in this initial, mute evidence, being is not a philosophical problem, any more than water is a philosophical problem for fish. The moment we talk about being, we are still not talking about it in its all-embracing form, because, as we have said, the problem of being (the most immediate and natural of experiences) is the least natural of all problems, the one that common sense never poses: we begin to grope our way through being by carving entities out of it and gradually constructing ourselves a World.
Therefore, since common sense is incapable of thinking of being before having organized it within the system, or the uncoordinated series, of entities, entities are the way in which being makes its rendezvous with us, and it is from there that we must begin.
And so we come to the central question of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. This question is posed in the form of an observation from which Aristotle does not begin but very nearly arrives at after a succession of steps—stumbling over it, so to speak, as he gradually moves from the first book to the fourth, where, after having said that there is a science that studies being as such, at the point where one would expect the first tentative definition of the object of this science, Aristotle repeats as the sole possible definition what in the first book (992b 19) had appeared only as a parenthetical observation: being can be said in many ways (leghetai men pollachos) and in several senses (1001a 33).
What Aquinas thought the intellect percipit quasi notissimum, the horizon of our thinking and talking, Aristotle thought (but Aquinas agreed) was by nature (if it had a nature, but we know that it is neither genus nor species) ambiguous and polysemic.
For some authors this statement consigns the problem of being to a fundamental aporia, which the post-Aristotelian tradition has only attempted to reduce, without destroying its dramatic potential. Indeed, Aristotle was the first to try to reduce it to acceptable dimensions, and he did so by playing on the adverb “in many ways.”
The many ways might be reduced to four. Being can be said (i) as accidental being (it is the being predicated of the copula, and so we say The man is white or is standing); (ii) as true, and so it may be true or false that a certain man is white, or that man is an animal; (iii) as potentiality and actuality, and so if it is not true that this healthy man is ill at present, he could fall ill, and today we might say that we could think of a possible world in which it is true that this man is ill; and (iv) being can be said ens per se, in other words as substance. In Aristotle’s view, the polysemy of being subsides in the degree to which, however we speak of being, we say it “with reference to one principle” (1003b 5–6), i.e., to substances. Substances are individual existing beings, and we have perceptual evidence of them. Aristotle never doubted the existence of some individual substances (Aristotle never had doubts about the reality of the world as it appears in our everyday experience), substances in which and only in which the Platonic forms themselves are actualized, without their existing before or afterward in some pale Space beyond the heavens, and this security enables him to master the many senses of being. “The primary meaning of being is the essence that signifies (semainei) the substance (ousia)” (1028a 4–6).
The problem of Aristotelian being lay not in the pollachos but in the leghetai. Whether it is said in one or many ways, being is something that is said. It may well be the horizon of every other evidence, but it becomes a philosophical problem only when we begin to talk about it, and it is precisely our talking about it that makes it ambiguous and polyvocal. The fact that this ambiguity can be reduced does not alter the fact that we become aware of it only through speech. As it is thinkable, being manifests itself to us right from the outset as an effect of language.
The moment it appears before us, being arouses interpretation; the moment we can speak of it, it is already interpreted. There is no help for it. Not even Parmenides escaped this circle, despite his having labeled the onomata unreliable. But the onomata were fallacious names that we are led, prior to philosophical reflection, to give to that which becomes. But Parmenides was the first to express in words the invitation to recognize (and interpret) the many signs (semata) through which being arouses our discourse. And for being to exist, it is necessary to say as well as to think (DK 6).
A fortiori, in Aristotle’s view, without words being neither is nor is not: it is there, we are within it, but we don’t think we are. Aristotle’s ontology, and this has been widely commented on, has verbal roots. In the Metaphysics every mention of being, every question and answer on being lies within the context of a verbum dicendi (be it leghein, semainein, or others). When we read (1005b 25–26) that “it is impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not,” we come across the verb ypolambanein, which is indeed “to believe,” “to grasp with the mind,” but—given that the mind is logos—it also means “to take the word.”
It might be objected that we say without contradiction that which appertains to the substance, a substance independent of our speaking about it. But up to what point? How do we talk about the substance? How can we say without contradiction that man is a rational animal, whereas saying that he is white or that he runs indicates only a transient accident and cannot therefore be the object of science? In the act of perception the active intellect abstracts the essence from the synolon (matter + form), and therefore it seems that in the cognitive moment we immediately and effortlessly grasp the to ti en einai (1028b 33.36), what being was and therefore stably is. But what can we say of the essence? All we can do is give its definition: “And definition results from the necessity of its meaning something. Definition is the notion (logos) whose name (onoma) is the sign (semeion)” (1012a 22–24).
Alas! We have irrepressible proof of the existence of individuals, but we can say nothing about them, except by naming them through their essence, that is to say by genus and differentia (not therefore “this man” but “man”). The moment we enter the universe of essences, we enter the universe of definitions, that is to say the universe of language that defines.10
We have few names and few definitions for an infinity of single things. Therefore recourse to the universal is not strength of thought but weakness of discourse. The problem is that man always talks in general while things are singular. Language names by blurring the irrepressible proof of the existing individual. And all attempted remedies will be vain: the reflexio ad phantasmata, reducing the concept to flatus vocis with respect to the individual as the sole intuitive datum, entrenching oneself behind the indexicals, proper names, and rigid designators . . . all panaceas. With the exception of a few cases (in which we might not even speak, but point a finger, whistle, seize by an arm—but in those cases we are simply being and not talking about being), we are invariably already situated in the universal when we talk.
And therefore the anchorage of substances, which should make up for the many senses of being, owing to the language that says it, brings us back to language as the condition of what we know about the substances themselves. As has been shown (Eco 1984: 2.4), in order to define, it is necessary to construct a tree of predicables, of genera, of species, and of differences; and Aristotle, who in fact suggested such a tree to Porphyry, never managed (in the natural works in which he really intends to define essences) to apply it in a homogeneous and rigorous fashion (see Eco 1990: 4.2.1.1).
But the trouble with being is not that it is just an effect of language. It is that not even language defines it. There is no definition for being. Being is not a genus, not even the most general of them all, and it therefore eludes all definition, if it is necessary to use the genus and the differentia in order to make a definition. Being is that which enables all subsequent definitions to be made. But all definitions are the effect of the logical and therefore semiosical organization of the world. Every time we tried to warrant this organization by turning to that safe parameter that is being, we would revert to saying, i.e., to that language for which we are supposed to be seeking a guarantee. As Aubenque observed, “Not only can we say nothing about being, but being tells us nothing about those things we attribute it to” (1962: 232). And this is natural: if being is the horizon of departure, saying that something “is” adds nothing to what was already self-evident by the very fact of naming that something as the object of our discourse. Being underpins all discourses except the one we hold about it (which tells us nothing we did not already know the very moment we began to talk about it).
Some solutions have been put forward to offer a way around this aporia. We could place being elsewhere, in an area where it should not and could not be conditioned by language. This was what Neoplatonism attempted to do, right to its extreme consequences. In order to elude our definitions, the One, the foundation of being, is collocated before being itself and made ineffable: “That being may be, the One may not be being” (Enneads, V, 2.1). But in order to place the One beyond the reach of being itself, language becomes negative theology; it circumscribes the unsayable by means of exclusions, metaphors, and negations, as if negation were not itself a motor of semiosis, a principle of identification by opposition.
Or it was possible, as the Schoolmen did, to identify the foundation of being with God as ipsum esse. It was as theology that philosophy first filled the empty spaces left by metaphysics as the science of being. But philosophically this is an escamotage: it is thus for the philosopher with religious convictions, who must accept that faith will act as a stand-in where reason can say nothing; it is thus for the nonbelieving philosopher, who sees theology constructing the ghost of God in reaction to philosophy’s incapacity to control what, while it is more evident than any other thing, is still a mere ghost as far as he is concerned. Besides, just to be able to talk of the ipsum esse, which is supposed to be the foundation of our very power of speech, it is necessary to elaborate a language. Since this cannot be the same language that names the entities univocally, and in accordance with the laws of argumentation, it must be the language of analogy. But it is imprecise to say that the principle of analogy allows us to talk of being. It is not that the analogy comes first and then the possibility of applying it to the ens or even to the ipsum esse. We can talk of God precisely because we admit right from the start that an analogia entis exists: of being, not of language. But who says that being is analogous? Language. It is a circle.
And therefore it is not analogy that enables us to speak of being; it is being that, through the way in which it is expressible in words, allows us to speak of God by analogy. Locating being in the ipsum esse, which is its own foundation and makes being a part of the worldly entities, does not exempt theology from talking about it (otherwise it is a pure beatific vision, and we know that even “a l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa”).fn2
Other solutions? There is one, philosophically sublime and almost impregnable: to reabsorb language completely within being. Being is talked of and defines itself within the all-embracing bosom of a Substance where order and the connection of ideas are the same as order and the connection of things. There is no longer a discontinuity between being and its foundations, there is no longer a hiatus between being and the entities (the modes that constitute its flesh), there is no longer a fracture between substance and its definition, there is no longer a gap between thinking and that which is thought. And yet even in an architecture as unyielding and perfect as that of Spinoza, language worms its way in and constitutes a problem. Language seems perfectly suited to the object, which uses it to name itself, as long as it is talking in an abstract way about the substance, its attributes and its modes; but it appears very weak, tentative, perspective, and contingent when it has to reckon, yet again, with the names of worldly entities—man, for example. Indeed,
those who have most often contemplated man’s erect posture, by the name man understand an animal with an erect posture; those who, on the other hand, have been accustomed to observing other things, will form a common image of men, i.e., that man is an animal who laughs, a biped, without feathers, rational; and so each will form universal images of other things, according to the dispositions of his own body. (Ethics XI, scholium 1)
Isn’t this a reproposal of the poverty of language and thought, that penuria nominum and that abundance of homonyms that used to torment theoreticians of the universals, complicated by the fact that language is now subject to the “dispositions of the body”? And how will we be able to have complete trust in this somatotypic language, when it claims to speak (in terms of geometric order!) of being?
This left one last possibility: as being had been separated from the essence and the essence from existence centuries before, all that remained was to divorce being from itself.
When Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?, wonders, “Why is there being rather than nothing?,” he uses Seiende, not Sein. Heidegger thought that the trouble with metaphysics was that it was always taken up with the entity but not with its foundation, that is to say, being and the truth of being. By questioning the entity as an entity, metaphysics has avoided turning to being as being. It has never concentrated on its own foundation: it was part of metaphysics’ destiny that being would elude it. Metaphysics has referred to the entity in its totality in the belief that it was talking about being as such; it dealt with the entity as entity while being manifests itself only in and for the Dasein. And so we cannot talk about being if not in reference to us, insofar as we are thrown into the world. To think being as being (to think of the truth of being as the foundation of metaphysics) means abandoning metaphysics. The problem of being and the unveiling of it is not a problem for metaphysics as the science of the entity, it is the central problem of existence.
And so enter the idea of Nothingness, which “comes together” with the idea of the entity. It springs from feelings of dread, or angst. This angst makes us feel out of place in the entity and “robs us of speech.” Without speech there is no more entity: as the entity flees, there arises the nonentity, in other words, nothingness. Angst reveals Nothingness to us. But this nothingness is identified with being (Sein), as the being of the entity, its foundation and truth, and in this sense Heidegger can fall in with Hegel’s remark to the effect that pure being and pure nothingness are the same thing. From this experience of Nothingness arises the need to consider being as the essence of the foundations of the entity.
And yet, non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate, especially notions as primitive as the entity, being, and nothingness. It is hard to separate Heidegger’s thought from the language in which he expresses himself, and he was well aware of this: proud as he was of the philosophical nature of his German, what would he have thought had he been born in Oklahoma, with an extremely vague to be and a single Being for Seiende and Sein? If there were still any need to repeat that being appears to us only as an effect of language, the way in which these two words (Seiende and Sein) are hypostatized into two Somethings ought to suffice. The two entities are created because there is a language, and they can be maintained only if the aporia of being as described in Aristotle is not wholly accepted.
While for Heidegger the entity (ens, Seiende) corresponds to substances, of which Aristotle had no doubt (nor does Heidegger have any, because, despite all his yarn-spinning about nothingness, like Aristotle and Kant he never doubted that things are and offer themselves spontaneously to our sensible intuition), there certainly might be something vaguer and more original that lingers on beneath the illusory idea of naming substances univocally. But up to this point we would still be at Parmenides’s diffidence with regard to the onomata.Sein