From the Tree to the Labyrinth (102 page)

Figure 18.2

The problem would be no different—it would just become more complicated—if the World were not ordered in a stable way, but chaotic (and capable of evolving and restructuring itself over time). Constantly changing the structures of its triplets, the language of the Mind would have to keep constantly adapting itself to the changing situations.

And if, on the other hand, the World were hyperstructured in a stable way, that is, if it were organized according to a single structure given by a particular sequence of ten atoms, the Mind would still only have six triplets of symbols to describe this hyperstructure. It would be obliged, then, to attempt to describe it piecemeal, from local points of view, and would never be able to describe it in its entirety. But it would be precisely the choice of these partial solutions that made ever more innovative and original points of view possible.

THIRD HYPOTHESIS.
   The Mind has more elements than the World. The Mind has ten symbols at its disposal (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J) and the World only three atoms (1, 2, 3), as in
Figure 18.3
. This is not all—the Mind can combine these ten symbols in duplets, triplets, quadruplets, and so on. Which is the same thing as saying that the cerebral structure would have more neurons and more combinatory possibilities among neurons than the number of atoms and their combinations identifiable in the World.

Figure 18.3

Clearly, this hypothesis would have to be abandoned immediately, because it conflicts with the original assumption that the Mind is part of the World. In order to consent this hypothesis, the Mind would have to step out of the World: it would be a kind of intensely thinking divinity compelled to account for an extremely impoverished world, a world that, on top of that, it does not know, because it was cobbled together by a Demiurge with no imagination. We could also think of a World that somehow secretes more
res cogitans
than
res extensa,
a World that has produced, that is, a fairly limited number of thinkable structures, using few atoms, and is holding others in reserve to use them as symbols of the Mind. It would follow that the Mind would have an astronomical number of combinations of symbols to represent a 123 structure of the world (or at most its six possible combinations), always from a different point of view. The Mind could, for example, represent 123 (by combinatory calculus) by means of 3,628,800 decuplets, each of which would not only be designed to account for 123 but also for the day and the hour when it is represented, for the internal state of the Mind itself at that moment, and for the intentions and purposes with which the Mind was representing it. There would be an excess of thought with respect to the simplicity of the World, and the supply of possible representations would exceed the number of possible existing structures. And maybe this is what really happens, seeing that we are able to lie and construct fantastic worlds, and imagine and anticipate alternative states of things (
Figure 18.4
).

Figure 18.4

FOURTH HYPOTHESIS.
   The Mind has ten symbols, and the atoms of the World are ten. Both Mind and World can combine their elements, as in the third hypothesis, in duplets, triplets, quadruplets … decuplets (see
Figure 18.4
). The Mind would then have an astronomical number of propositions at its disposal to describe an astronomical number of worldly structures. And this is not all—given the abundance of as yet unrealized worldly combinations, it could plan modifications of the World, as it could be continually taken by surprise by worldly combinations it had not foreseen; in addition to which, it would be kept very busy explaining in different ways how it itself worked.

What we would have would be, not so much an excess of thought with respect to the simplicity of the world—as was the case with the third hypothesis—but a kind of constant challenge among contenders fighting on potentially equal terms, though in fact changing weapons with each attack and putting the adversary at a disadvantage. The Mind would confront the World from an excess of perspectives, the World would elude the snares of the Mind by constantly changing the rules of the game (including the Mind’s own rules).

Now, it is not a question of deciding which of the four hypotheses is the correct one. The mental experiment was designed to demonstrate that,
however things may go,
not only is it possible for a plurality of interpretations to coexist with the presumed legality of the interpreted object, but also that it would not even make sense to try out all the interpretations unless we were to presuppose that there was something there to interpret.

I believe that recognizing the legality of the object leads us to distinguish a philosophy of conjecture and interpretance from a philosophy of weak thought. There is a minimal and noningenuous definition of realism, according to which a realist is someone who believes that things
go a certain way
—even though we may not know which way and may never succeed in knowing. And even if they were convinced that they will never know how things go, this kind of realist continues to investigate how they go, hoping to reach a satisfactory approximation, and forever prepared to correct their interpretations should things oppose the slightest resistance to their “readings” of them. The point is that this realist of ours starts out from the premise that, even if things were to go a different way every day (if the world had no rules), this too would still be the way things went (the ironclad law that guarantees permanent irregularity). So that, though we may accept that the descriptions we give of the World (or of a text as World) are always prospective, this ought not to prevent our readings from attempting to keep pace with the world, at least from a certain point of view, without ever pretending that the said readings, even when they seem on the whole to be “good,” are to be considered definitive. And, since in this series of interpretations we stick to the parameters offered by the facts to be interpreted (even if only locally and from a certain perspective), we must presume that the readings we give of the facts may be accurate or they may be completely off the wall.

But did anyone ever really believe that there are no facts, only interpretations? Vattimo and Rovatti were not wrong in appealing to Nietzsche, because that is where this very theory is explained, in an especially intense manner in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” (“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”) (1873), a text I already discussed in
Kant and the Platypus.
Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays with fictions that it calls truth, or a system of concepts, based on the legislation of language. We think we are talking about (and knowing) trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original essences. Every word immediately becomes a concept, draining away with its pallid universality the differences between fundamentally unequal things: so we believe that compared to the multiplicity of individual leaves there exists a “primal” leaf “from which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, dyed, curled, painted—but by a clumsy pair of hands, so that no single example turned out to be a faithful, correct and reliable copy of the primal form” (Nietzsche 1873: 145). It is difficult for us to admit that birds or insects perceive the world differently from us, and it makes no sense either to say which perception is the correct one, because this would call for that criterion of “exact perception” that does not exist because “nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us” (ibid.: 145).

Truth, then, becomes “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,” produced poetically, only to become fossilized into knowledge, “illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions” (ibid.: 146), coins whose images has been rubbed away and are now considered simply as pieces of metal and no longer as coins. We thus become accustomed to lying according to convention, having reduced the metaphors to
schemata
and
concepts.
Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and delimitations, entirely constructed by language, an immense “Roman
columbarium
” of concepts, the graveyard of intuition.

No question but that this is a fascinating account of how the edifice of language regiments the landscape of the world, but Nietzsche fails to consider two intuitively evident phenomena. One is that, if we adapt ourselves to the constrictions of the columbarium, we can still manage to give some kind of account of the World (if someone goes to see a doctor and tells him he has been bitten by a dog, the doctor knows what sort of injection to give him, even if he is not familiar with the particular dog that bit him). The other is that every now and then the World forces us to adapt the columbarium, or even to choose an alternative model to the columbarium (which is, at the end of the day, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms).

Nietzsche is undeniably cognizant of the existence of natural constrictions and can see a way to change. The constrictions seem to him to be “terrible forces” that constantly press upon us, countering “scientific” truths with other truths of a different nature; but he evidently refuses to recognize them by conceptualizing them in their turn, given that it is in order to escape them that we have wrought, by way of a defense, our conceptual suit of armor. Change is possible, though not in the form of tinkering with the structure, but instead in the form of a permanent poetic revolution: “if each of us still had a different kind of sensuous perception, if we ourselves could only perceive now as, variously, a bird, a worm, or a plant does, or if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second person were to see the same stimulus as blue, while a third were even to hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws” (ibid.: 149).

Therefore, art (and with it myth) “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; it constantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the waking human being in ways which are just as multiform, irregular, inconsequential, incoherent, charming and ever-new, as things are in the world of dream” (ibid.: 151).

If these are the premises, our first option would be to reject what surrounds us (and the way in which we vainly try to reduce it to order) and take refuge in dreams as a flight from reality. Nietzsche in fact cites Pascal, for whom, in order to be happy, all it would take would be to dream
every night
of being king, but he then admits that this dominion of art over life, however delightful, would be a deception. Otherwise, and this is what Nietzsche’s heirs have taken as the real lesson, art can say what it says because it is Being itself, in its weakness and generosity, that accepts any definition, and takes pleasure from seeing itself seen as changeable, a dreamer, extenuatingly vigorous and victoriously weak, no longer as “fullness, presence or foundation, but rather as fracture, absence of foundation, work and pain” (Vattimo 1993: 73). Being can therefore only be spoken insofar as it is in decline; instead of imposing itself, it withdraws. Thus we have arrived at an “ontology organized into ‘weak’ categories” (ibid.: 5). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of Being (Vattimo 1984: 158). From now on, Being will present itself only “as suspension and withdrawal” (Vattimo 1997: 13).