by Umberto Eco
The holism of philosophers is similar to linguistic holism, wherein a given language, through its semantic and syntactic structure, is said to impose a particular vision of the world in which the speaker is, so to speak, a prisoner. Benjamin Lee Whorf, for example, pointed out that there is a tendency in Western languages to consider many events as objects, and an expression such as “three days” is grammatically equivalent to “three apples”; whereas some Native American languages focus on the process—they see events whereas we see things. For this reason, the Hopi language would be better equipped than English for defining certain phenomena studied by modern physics. And Whorf also pointed out that the Eskimos have four different words for snow, depending on its texture, and they would therefore see different things where we see only one. Leaving aside the fact that this suggestion has been disputed, a Western skier knows nevertheless how to distinguish between various textures of snow, and it would be quite enough for an Eskimo to meet us to understand perfectly well that when we say “snow” for the four things that he supposedly describes in different ways, we are behaving in the same way as a Frenchman who uses the word glace for ice, glacier, ice cream, mirror, and window glass—and the Frenchman isn’t such a prisoner of his own language that he shaves in the morning looking at himself in an ice cream.
Finally, apart from the fact that not all contemporary thought accepts the holistic approach, holism follows the line of those perspective-based theories of knowledge according to which reality can be given different perspectives and each perspective matches one aspect of it, even if it doesn’t exhaust its unfathomable richness. There is nothing relativistic in claiming that reality is always defined from a particular point of view (which does not mean subjective and individual), nor does the assertion that we see it always and only under a certain description stop us from believing and hoping that what we picture is always the same thing.
Alongside cognitive relativism, the encyclopedias refer to cultural relativism. First Montaigne, then Locke, had begun to understand, at a time when Europe was coming into more significant contact with other peoples, that different cultures not only have different languages or mythologies but also different conceptions of morality (all reasonable in their own context). It seems indisputable that certain primitive people in the forests of New Guinea, even today, regard cannibalism as legitimate and commendable (while an Englishman would not), and it seems similarly indisputable that certain countries treat adulterous women in a manner different from ours. But, first, recognizing the variety of cultures does not mean denying that certain types of conduct are more universal (for example, a mother’s love for her children, or the fact that people generally use the same facial expressions to express disgust or delight), and second, it does not automatically imply that this recognition is tantamount to moral relativism, the idea that since there are no ethical values valid for all cultures, we can freely adapt our behavior to fit our personal tastes or interests. Recognizing that another culture is different, and must be respected in this, does not mean abdicating our own cultural identity.
How then has the specter of relativism come to be built up as a standard ideology, the canker of contemporary civilization?
There is a secular critique of relativism, directed mainly against the excesses of cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, who presents his arguments in a book titled Senza radici (Without Roots, 2004), written jointly with the then Cardinal Ratzinger, is well aware that there are differences between cultures, but claims there are certain values of Western culture (such as democracy, the separation between church and state, and liberalism) that have proved superior to those of other cultures. Now, Western culture has good reason to regard itself as more developed than others in terms of these ideas, but in claiming that such superiority ought to be universally evident, Pera uses a dubious argument. He says, “If members of culture B freely show they prefer culture A and not vice versa—if, for example, there is a migrant influx from Islamic countries to the West and not vice versa—then it is reasonable to believe that A is better than B.” The argument is weak when we recall that the Irish in the nineteenth century did not immigrate en masse to the United States because they preferred that Protestant country to their beloved Catholic Ireland, but because at home they were dying of starvation as a result of potato blight. Pera’s rejection of cultural relativism is dictated by the concern that tolerance for other cultures degenerates into acquiescence, and that the West is giving way under the pressure of immigration to the demands of outside cultures. Pera’s problem is not the defense of the Absolute but the defense of the West.
Giovanni Jervis, in his book Contro il relativismo (2005), gives us a portrait of a relativist—a strange blending of a late Romantic, postmodern thinker of Nietzschean origin with a follower of New Age thinking—that seems to be constructed to support his arguments. This person’s relativism appears irrational, unscientific. Jervis denounces a reactionary quality in cultural relativism: to claim that every form of society is to be respected and justified, and even idealized, encourages the segregation of populations. Moreover, those cultural anthropologies that, rather than seeking to identify a continuity of biological characteristics and behavior between populations, have instead emphasized their diversity due to culture alone—giving too much importance to cultural factors and ignoring biological ones—and have indirectly supported once again the primacy of the spirit over matter, thereby supporting the arguments of religious thought.
It is therefore not clear whether relativism is contrary to the religious spirit or whether it is a disguised form of religious thought. If only the anti-relativists would agree among themselves. But the fact is that different people mean different things when they talk about relativism.
For some Christians there is a double fear: that cultural relativism necessarily leads to moral relativism, and claiming there are different ways of verifying the truth of a proposition casts doubt on the possibility of recognizing an absolute truth.
On cultural relativism, Cardinal Ratzinger, in various doctrinal notes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, saw a close relationship between cultural relativism and ethical relativism, regretting that various people claim ethical pluralism to be the condition for democracy.
Cultural relativism does not, as I have already said, imply ethical relativism. Cultural relativism allows a Papuan from New Guinea to put a spike through his nose and yet, by virtue of an ethical principle that our group does not hold in question, it does not allow an adult (not even a priest) to abuse a seven-year-old child.
As for the contrast between relativism and truth, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et ratio, stated that “abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned. This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism that have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread skepticism.”
And Ratzinger, in a homily of 2005, said that “a dictatorship of relativism is being established, which recognizes nothing definite or allows as a single lone measure the personal self and its wishes. Yet we have another measure: the Son of God, the true man” (“Missa pro eligendo romano pontefice,” April 18, 2005).
Here are two opposing notions of truth, one as a semantic property of what is said and the other as a property of divinity. This is due to the fact that both notions of truth appear in the holy scriptures (at least according to the translations through which we know them). Truth is sometimes used as a correspondence between something said and the way in which things are (“Verily, verily, I say unto you,” in the sense of “That’s truly what I’m saying”) and sometimes truth is an intrinsic property of divinity (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”). This led many fathers of the church to positions that Ratzinger would now define
as relativistic, since they said it was not important to worry about whether a given statement on the world corresponded to the way in which things were, provided it focused attention on the only truth worthy of such a name—the message of salvation. Saint Augustine, when faced with the dispute over whether the earth was round or flat, seemed inclined to think it was round, but recalled that such knowledge did not help to save the soul, and therefore took the view that in practice one was much the same as the other.
It is difficult to find among Cardinal Ratzinger’s many writings a definition of truth that does not invoke the truth revealed and embodied in Christ. But if the truth of faith is truth revealed, why contrast it with the truth of philosophers and scientists, which is a concept of another sort, with other purposes and character? It would be enough to follow Thomas Aquinas, who, in De aeternitate mundi, knowing perfectly well that to support Averroës’s view about the eternity of the world was a terrible heresy, accepted through faith that the world was created, but admitted that from the cosmological point of view it could not be rationally demonstrated either that it was created or that it was eternal. For Ratzinger, however, in his contribution to a book entitled Il monoteismo (2002), the essence of all modern philosophical and scientific thought is as follows:
Truth as such—so it is thought—cannot be known, but we can gradually advance only by small steps of establishing what is true and false. There is a growing tendency to replace the concept of truth with that of consensus. But this means that man becomes detached from the truth and thus also from the distinction between good and evil, submitting completely to the principle of the majority . . . Man plans and “builds” the world without pre-set criteria and thus necessarily exceeds the concept of human dignity, so that even human rights become problematic. In such a conception of reason and rationality there is no space left for the concept of God.
This extrapolation, which passes from a prudent concept of scientific truth as an object of continual investigation and correction, to a declaration of the destruction of all human dignity, is unsustainable. That is, unsustainable unless all modern thought is identified with this line of reasoning: there are no facts but only interpretations, which leads to the declaration that existence has no basis and therefore that God is dead, and finally that if there is no God, then anything is possible.
Now, Ratzinger and the anti-relativists are, generally speaking, neither fantasists nor conspiracy theorists. Quite simply, the anti-relativists whom I shall describe as moderate or critical identify in their enemy that specific form of extreme relativism whereby facts do not exist, only interpretations; those anti-relativists I shall call radicals extend this claim to the whole of modern thought, committing an error that—at least when I was at university—would have failed them in their history of philosophy exam.
The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations began with Nietzsche and is explained very clearly in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). Since nature has thrown away the key, the mind works on conceptual fictions that it calls truth. We believe we are talking about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but they are metaphors that do not correspond to the original entities. When faced with the multiplicity of individual leaves, there is no primordial “leaf,” the model upon which “all leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands.” A bird or insect perceives the world in a different way than we do, and it is quite meaningless to say which perception is more accurate, because to do so we would need to have the criterion of “correct perception,” which does not exist. Nature “knows no forms and no concepts, nor even any species, but only an X which for us remains inaccessible and indefinable.” Truth then becomes “a movable host of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms,” of poetical inventions that have become rigid knowledge, “illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten.”
Nietzsche, however, avoids considering two phenomena. One is that, by adjusting to the constraints of our dubious knowledge, we manage to some extent to reckon with nature: when someone has been bitten by a dog, the doctor knows what sort of injection to give, even if he knows nothing about the actual dog that bit the person. The other is that every so often nature compels us to expose our knowledge as illusory and to choose an alternative (which is then the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms). Nietzsche is aware of the existence of natural constrictions, which appear to him as “terrible forces” that continually press in upon us, conflicting with our “scientific” truths. But he refuses to conceptualize them, sensing that it was to escape from them that we built our conceptual armor, as a defense. Change is possible, not in the form of reorganization, but as a permanent poetic revolution: “If each of us had a different kind of sensuous perception, if we ourselves could only perceive things 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 ever to hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws.” Art (together with myth) therefore “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonyms; 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 dreams” (translation by Ronald Speirs).
If these are the conditions, the first possibility would be to take refuge in dream as an escape from reality. But Nietzsche himself admits that this dominion of art over life would be deceptive, though supremely enjoyable. Alternatively—and this is the real lesson that posterity has taken from Nietzsche—art can say what it says because it is the Individual himself who accepts whatever definition, since it is unfounded. This fading out of the Individual coincided for Nietzsche with the death of God. This enables some Christians to draw from this proclamation of death a false Dostoyevskian conclusion: if God does not exist, or no longer exists, then all is permissible.
But if there is no heaven or hell, then it is the nonbeliever who realizes it is essential for us to save ourselves on earth through benevolence, understanding, and moral law. Eugenio Lecaldano published a book in 20062 that claimed, with ample evidence, that only by leaving God to one side can we lead a truly moral life. I certainly do not intend to establish here whether Lecaldano and the authors he cites are correct; I wish only to point out that there are those who claim that the absence of God does not eliminate the ethical problem—and Cardinal Martini was well aware of this when he established a teaching post in Milan for nonbelievers. That Cardinal Martini did not then become pope may cast doubt on the divine inspiration of the papal conclave, but such matters go beyond my competence. Elie Wiesel reminded us, a couple of weeks ago, that those who imagined they could do what they liked were not those who thought God was dead, but those who thought they themselves were God (a common failing among dictators, great and small).
In any event, the idea that there are no facts but only interpretations is certainly not shared by all of contemporary thought, the greater part of which makes these objections to Nietzsche and his followers:
If there were no facts but only interpretations, then an interpretation would be an interpretation of what?
If interpretations interpret each other, there would still have to have been an object or event in the first place that had spurred us to interpret.
If the individual were not definable, we would still have to explain who it is who is talking about it metaphorically, and the problem of saying something true would be shifted from the object to the subject of the knowledge. God might be dead, but not Nietzsche. On what basis do we justify the presence of Nietzsche? By saying he is only a metaphor? But if he is, who says so? And not only that, but even if reality is described using metaphors, in order to be elaborated there have to exist words that have a literal meaning and denote things we understand through experience: I
cannot call a table support a “leg” unless I have a nonmetaphorical notion of the human leg, knowing its form and function.
And finally, in claiming that there is no longer a criterion for verification between one thing and another, we forget that what is outside us (which Nietzsche calls the terrible forces) every so often opposes our attempts to express that criterion even metaphorically—that, let us say, you cannot cure an inflammation by using the phlogiston theory, whereas you can with antibiotics; and therefore one medical theory is better than another.
Therefore, an Absolute does not perhaps exist, or if it exists it is neither imaginable nor attainable, but natural forces do exist that support or challenge our interpretations. If I interpret an open door painted in trompe l’oeil as a real door and go to walk straight through it, the fact that it is an impenetrable wall will undermine my interpretation.
There must be a way in which things are or behave—and the evidence is not only that all men are mortal, but also that if I try to pass through a wall, I break my nose. Death and that wall are the only form of Absolute about which we can be in no doubt.
The evidence of that wall, which says no when we want to interpret it as if it were not there, will perhaps be a fairly modest criterion of truth for guardians of the Absolute, but, to quote Keats, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
[Lecture given during the Milanesiana festival of literature, music, and cinema, July 9, 2007.]
The Beauty of the Flame