by Umberto Eco
Kant has just told us how one develops an abduction worthy of Robinson Crusoe. And if someone were to observe that in this case art has nonetheless imitated a regular figure, not invented by art, but produced by pure mathematical intuition, we have only to cite an example that occurs shortly before the one just quoted. In that case, as an illustration of empirical finality (as opposed to the pure finality of the circle, which seems to have been invented for the purpose of highlighting all of the demonstrations that can be deduced from it), Kant pictures a beautiful garden, in the French style with its well-ordered flowerbeds and avenues, where art prevails over nature; and he speaks of empirical, certainly, and of real finality, for we are well aware that the garden has been planned with an aim and a function in mind. We may say that seeing the garden or the chair as a organism oriented toward an end calls for a less risky hypothesis, because I already know that artificial objects respond to the intentions of the artificer, while judgment postulates purpose (and indirectly a creative formativity, a sort of natura naturans) as the only way to understand it. But in any case even the artificial object cannot help being invested with reflective judgment.
This teleological version of the schema is not developed with absolute clarity even in the third Critique. See, for instance, the famous paragraph 59 which has always seduced anyone who attempted to find in Kant the elements of a philosophy of language. In the first place, a distinction is made between schemata, specific to the pure concepts of the intellect, and examples (Beispiele), valid for empirical concepts. The idea in itself is not without its appeal: in the schema of the dog or the tree prototypical ideas come into play, as if all dogs could be represented by the ostension of a dog (or by the image of a single dog). It remains to be seen how this image, which is supposed to mediate between the manifold of the intuition and the concept, can avoid being interwoven with concepts—being the image of a dog in general and not of that dog. And, once again, what “example” of a dog could mediate between intuition and concept, since it certainly appears that for empirical concepts the schema ends up coinciding with the possibility of “figuring” a generic concept?
Immediately afterward, Kant says that making something perceptible to the senses (“hypotyposis”) may be schematic when a concept grasped by the intellect is given the corresponding intuition is given (and this is valid for the schema of the circle, indispensable for understanding the concept of “plate”). On the other hand, Kant continues, it is symbolic when, to a concept that only Reason can think of, to which there exists no corresponding intuition, one is provided by analogy, as would be the case, for example, if I chose to represent the monarchical state as a human body. Here certainly Kant is speaking not only of symbols in the logical-formal sense (which for him are mere “characterisms”) but also of phenomena such as metaphor or allegory. But a gap still remains between schemata and symbols (we have only to think of the platypus): there is intuition, but not yet the concept, and I cannot recognize it or define it through a metaphor.
13.6. Opus Postumum
Kant bridges this gap in his Opus Postumum, in which he again tries even harder to determine the various particular laws of physics that cannot be deduced from the categories alone. In order to ground physics, he must postulate the ether as matter that, distributed throughout cosmic space, is found in and penetrates all bodies.
External perceptions, as material for a possible experience, which lack only the form of their connection, are the effect of the moving (or driving) forces of matter. Now, to mediate the application of these motor forces to the relations that occur in experience calls for identifying empirical laws. These latter are not given a priori, they need concepts constructed by us (selbstgemachte). These are not concepts given by reason or experience but factitious concepts. They are problematic (and we recall that a problematic judgment depends on the Postulate of Empirical Thought in General, so that what is in harmony with the formal conditions of experience is possible).
Concepts of this kind must be thought as the foundation of natural inquiry. We must therefore postulate (in the case of the factitious concept of ether) an absolute whole that subsists in matter. Kant repeats on various occasions that this concept is not a hypothesis but a postulate of reason, but his suspicion of the term hypothesis has Newtonian roots. In fact, a concept (built on nothing, so to speak) that renders possible the totality of experience is an abduction, which, in order to explain certain Results, appeals to a Rule constructed ex novo.12
As Mathieu (1984) observes, apropos of Kant’s last writings, “The intellect makes experience by designing the structure according to which the driving forces of the object can act.” The reflective judgment, more than observing (and subsequently producing schemata), produces schemata so as to observe and test. And “such doctrine goes beyond that of the first Critique for the freedom that it assigns to the intellectual designing of the object” (Mathieu 1984: 231, n. 1). It is Mathieu (1984: 21) who again observes that “even keeping unchanged the necessary structure of the categories, one can equally take a further spontaneous activity into consideration, which the intellect performs starting with categories, but without remaining stalled at them … constructing not simply what derives from them, but all that we are able to think, and without falling into contradiction.” Perhaps to arrive at such boldness Kant had needed to pass through the aesthetic reflection of the third Critique; only then “is a new schematism born—the free schematism of the imagination, without concepts—as the primary capacity to organize perceptions” (cf. Garroni 1986: 226).
With this late schematism the intellect does not construct the simple definition of a possible object, but makes the object, constructs it, and in this activity (problematic in itself) it proceeds by trial and error.
At this point the notion of trial and error becomes crucial. If the schema of empirical concepts is a construct that attempts to make the objects of nature thinkable, and if a complete synthesis of empirical concepts can never be given, because new notes of the concept can always be discovered through experience (LI, 103), then the schemata themselves can only be revisable, fallible, destined to evolve over time. If the pure concepts of the intellect were to constitute a sort of intemporal repertoire, empirical concepts can only become “historic,” or cultural, however you choose to say it.13
Kant did not, in fact, say this, but it seems hard not to say it if one takes the doctrine of schematism to its logical conclusions. Peirce, for one, saw it this way, firmly putting the entire cognitive process down to hypothetical inference. Sensations appear as interpretations of stimuli; perceptions as interpretations of sensations; judgments of perception as the interpretation of perceptions; particular and general propositions as interpretations of perceptual judgments; and scientific theories as interpretations of a series of propositions (cf. Bonfantini and Grazia 1976: 13).
Given the infinite segmentability of experience, both perceptual schemata and propositions concerning the laws of nature themselves carve out entities or relations that—to a greater or lesser degree—always remain hypothetical and subject to the possibility of fallibilism.
Naturally at this point transcendentalism too will undergo its Copernican revolution. The guarantee that our hypotheses are “right” (or at least acceptable as such until proved otherwise) will no longer be sought in the a priori of the pure intellect (though its most abstract logical forms will be retained) but rather in the consensus, historic, progressive, and temporal of the Community.14 In the face of the risk of fallibilism, the transcendental too becomes historicized, an accumulation of received interpretations, accepted after a process of discussion, selection, and repudiation.15 An unstable foundation, if you will, based on the pseudo-transcendental of the Community (an optative idea more than a sociological category); and yet it is the Consensus of the Community that today makes us incline toward the Keplerian abduction rather than that of Tycho Brahe. Naturally the Community has come up with what we call called proofs, but it is not the authori
ty of the proofs in themselves that convinces us, or keeps us from falsifying them. Rather, it is the difficulty of calling into question one proof without overturning the entire system and the paradigm on which it is based.
This detranscendentalization of knowledge comes up again, thanks to the explicit influence of Peirce, in Dewey’s notion of the “warranted assertion” (or, as we prefer to call it today, “warranted assertibility”) and remains present in the various holistic conceptions of knowledge.
—Translated by Jacob D. Blakesley and Anthony Oldcorn
A revised version of “Il silenzio di Kant sull’ornitorinco” (Eco 1998a). The subject is treated at greater length in Eco (1997b: ch. 2).
1. For the works of Kant we will use the following abbreviations: Critique of Pure Reason (CPR/A and CPR/B, according to whether the reference is to the first or second edition), Critique of Judgment (CJ), Prolegomena (P), Logic (L), and Opus Postumum (OP). [Translator’s note: The present translation has greatly benefited from the example of Alastair McEwen’s excellent English version of Eco’s Kant and the Platypus, which, in ch. 2 “Kant, Peirce and the Platypus,” covers much of the same ground.]
2. Semiotic interests are evident in some pre-Critique writings such as paragraph 10 Kant’s inaugural dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (“On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World”), while, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-94-010-2018-3%2F1.pdf), we see how, in the courses taught in his later years, Kant outlined (at least as a didactic tool) a summary theory of the sign—not original, but indebted to traditional doctrines, from Sextus Empiricus to Locke and perhaps Lambert, but nevertheless showing a respectful interest in the theme of semiotics. For Kant and semiotics, see Garroni (1972, 1977).
3. Husserl (1970a: 2, 833).
4. Cf. the objections by Marconi and Vattimo (1986: xix) in their introduction to the Italian translation of Rorty (1979).
5. I owe this reflection to Ugo Volli (personal communication).
6. See Kant (1968: 221–301).
7. In P, para. 18 he also speaks of a kind of superordinate genus of empirical judgments (Empirischen Urteile), based on the perception of the senses, to which judgments of experience add the concepts originating in the pure intellect. It is not clear how these empirical judgments differ from perceptual judgments, but here perhaps (without getting into Kantian philology) we can limit the comparison to perceptual judgments and judgments of experience.
8. CPR/B: 107. Therefore, “the question is not at all resolved” (Martinetti 1946: 65) concerning the difference between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. Cassirer (1918) realized this too, although he only alludes to it in note 20 of chapter II, 2: “it must be noted that a similar exposition of empirical knowledge … is not so much the description of a real objective fact, as much as the construction of a borderline case.… For Kant, no ‘singular judgment’ is given that does not already claim some form of ‘universality.’ No ‘empirical’ proposition exists that does not include in itself something asserted ‘a priori’: since the very form of the judgment already contains this claim to ‘universal objective validity.’ ” Why such an important statement only in a footnote? Because Cassirer knows that he is extrapolating according to good sense and systematic coherence what Kant should have said plainly, in order to exclude any other ambiguous formulation.
9. Here we will leave undecided whether he has perceived the stones, but has repressed this perception, so to speak, or whether he perceives only when he responds, interpreting memories of still unconnected visual sensations.
10. See, on this issue, Garroni (1968: 123; 1986, III, 2, 2) and also De Mauro (1965: 2, 4).
11. On the other hand, let us put ourselves in the shoes of a hypothetical Adam who sees a cat for the first time, without ever having seen any other animals. For this Adam, a cat will be schematized as “something that moves,” and for the moment this quality will make the cat similar to water and to clouds. But one imagines that it will not take Adam long to place the cat together with dogs and hens, among moving bodies that react unforeseeably to his solicitation and quite foreseeably to his call. Thus he will distinguish the cat from water and clouds, which appear to move, but are indifferent to his presence.
12. In “Horns, Hooves, Shoes” (in Eco 1990b) I defined the phenomenon we are dealing with as creative abduction, Cf. also Bonfantini and Proni (1983). Even though the postulate of ether was subsequently shown to be erroneous, it worked pretty well for a considerable time. Abductions (one thinks of the theory of epicycles and deferents) are shown to be helpful when they hold up for a long time, until a more suitable, economical, and potent abduction comes onto the scene.
13. Or, as Paci (1957: 185) has it, they are founded not on necessity but on possibility: “a synthesis is impossible without time and therefore without the schema, without an image which is always something more than the simple projection, something new, or as we would say, something projecting, open to the future, open to the possible.”
14. Cf. Apel (1995). The transcendental subject of knowledge becomes the community that almost “evolutionistically” approaches what could become knowable “in the long run,” through processes of trial and error. See also Apel (1975). This induces us to reread the anti-Cartesian polemic and the refusal to admit unknowable data, which could be defined as a cautious and preemptive distancing from the Kantian idea of the thing in itself. The Dynamic Object starts as something in itself but in the process of interpretation becomes ever more—even if only potentially—appropriate.
15. The rehabilitation of Kant by Popper (1969, I, I, v) should be read in this sense. “When Kant said, ‘Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature but imposes its laws upon nature,’ he was right. But in thinking that these laws are necessarily true, or that we necessarily succeed in imposing them upon nature, he was wrong. Nature very often resists quite successfully, forcing us to discard our laws as refuted; but if we live we may try again.” Therefore Popper reformulates Kant’s dictum: “The intellect does not draw its laws from nature but tries (with a variable possibility of success) to impose on it the laws it freely invents” (I, 8).
14
Natural Semiosis and the Word in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I promessi sposi)
Writing the history of semiotic ideas does not only mean examining the philosophical or linguistic theories that deal explicitly with the sign or with communication. Often ideas that are not altogether irrelevant concerning these phenomena are expressed, however indirectly, in the declarations writers and artists have made about their poetics, or, alternatively, they can be extrapolated from the way in which processes of signification and communication are staged at the level of the narrative.
From this point of view it is legitimate, though by no means common practice, to ask oneself whether there exists a Manzonian semiotics, deducible not so much from Manzoni’s theoretical and critical writings, in which he discusses the genre of the historical novel and other problems we would define today as problems of literary theory, as from his narrative performance itself.
14.1. Action and Word
“By their actions, my dear fellow: all men are known by their actions” (p. 139), says the village innkeeper in chapter 7 of I promessi sposi, no less adept than the host of the Full Moon tavern in distinguishing a law-abiding citizen from an informer by the cut of his clothes, his tone of voice, and his overall bearing. Not so Renzo; a page earlier, when he entered the inn and saw one bravo, who did not stand aside to let him in, standing there on sentry duty, armed with a cudgel, with a red velvet cap over his quiff, his pigtails pinned with a comb at the back of his neck, while his comrades went on playing the game of morra, all of them exchanging eloquent nods among themselves. In this bildungsroman, Renzo is the last one to grow up, to become familiar, that is, with the signs and the way other people interpret them (only a
t the very end of the story will he have learned not to hold door knockers in his hand for too long and not to tie bells on his ankles). At this stage of the game, Renzo “looked at his two guests [Tonio and Gervaso], uncertain, as if hoping to find an explanation of those signals in their faces” (p. 137), clues he still has trouble deciphering. But he has not lived long enough yet, and, as we will learn later, only “a man’s life is the touchstone of his words” (pp. 403–404).
Suspicious of the notion that the course of human history unfolds in a rational manner, wary of every good intention which does not allow for the heterogenesis of ends, fearful of the evil that lurks in the things of this world, diffident toward the powerful and the arts by which they take advantage of the meek, Alessandro Manzoni appears to have synthesized his Enlightenment common sense and his Jansenistic rigor into a semiotic formula that can be extrapolated from many pages of his novel: (i) there is a natural semiosis, employed almost instinctively by those among the meek who have accumulated experience, according to which the various aspects of reality, when interpreted with prudence and a knowledge of the ways of the world, present themselves as symptoms, clues, signa or semeia in the classic sense of the term; and (ii) there is the artificial semiosis of verbal language which, either turns out be inadequate to give an account of reality or is used explicitly and maliciously to mask it, almost always for the purposes of exercising power. Verbal language, then, is deceptive by its very nature, whereas natural semiosis leads to errors and blunders only when it is polluted by language, which restates it and interprets it, or when its interpretation is clouded by the passions.