Kant e l'ornitorinco [Kant and the Platypus] by Umberto Eco. Published October 1997 by Bompiani, Milan, 454 pages, GB Pounds 17.00, ISBN 88 452 2868 1.
UMBERTO
Eco believes that mainstream philosophers working within the field of meaning
have been unduly insular, restricting themselves to technical questions
concerning the logical consequences of true statements and neglecting relations
between mind and reality. Compatibly with this, he holds that semiotics, which
studies signs and what they refer to in the world, is quite literally the only
legitimate form of philosophy today since it is the only one to have kept such
relations intact.
In
order to clarify the basic nature of existing objects in the world and ascertain
what exactly the semiotician's signs are referring to, Eco devotes the first of
his book's six chapters to the question of being, concluding that even inanimate
objects are, like the mind, dynamic and play an active role in causing us to
speak. Invoking the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev and the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce, he postulates a "Something-which-gives-you-a-kick
and says: Speak!". Objects, according to Eco, have the power to say
"no" to us, rejecting our questions when misplaced.
Having
meanwhile accepted on higher authority and without argument that nothing and
negation are purely linguistic and that being always presents itself positively,
Eco now sees that this active role attributed to objects is contradictory,
verging even on the absurd, and decides to resolve the matter by declaring his
position to be metaphorically and not literally true. What he fails to see is
that everything built on these figurative foundations will similarly be at best
only metaphorically true and therefore literally false.
His
abrupt treatment of Leibniz for having asked why there is something rather than
nothing and Heidegger for having posed a similar question (Eco's impatient
answer is "Because there is") reveals poor sensitivity to metaphysical
problems. But worse still, we are left with no clear idea of what sorts of
entities populate Eco's universe.
Eco's
animistic and other difficulties can be at least partly explained by the fact
that he is consciously attempting to fashion a new philosophy by transposing
interpretive approaches from the world of literary criticism to the real world.
In the same way that there are certain things which a text forbids one to say,
he maintains, there are certain things that the external world, too, vetoes. The
trouble is that the parallel between how words communicate and how inanimate
objects communicate is a limited one - unless, of course, one happens to be a
pantheist or a poet.
The
remainder of the book is devoted to the presentation and development of a key
principle of negotiation, from which Eco derives the overall position and
proposed panacea for philosophers' ills, which he calls contractual realism. By
way of illustration, he recounts how 80 years of negotiations were necessary
before scientists were finally able to classify the platypus as an anomalous
egg-laying mammal and a work of art in design rather than a clumsy attempt by
nature, as it were, to produce something better out of bits of other animals.
The
story serves to show that our first attempts to understand what we see are
framed within a categorial system that can be continually adjusted in the light
of new information. According to Eco, the fact that the negotiators compared the
platypus to beavers, ducks and moles but not to cats, elephants or ostriches,
and that no one argued that it had wings and could fly, proves not only that
there must be a concrete basis to negotiations, but also that there are certain
lines of resistance in reality that veto inappropriate comparisons.
The
long-awaited thought experiment conceived in order to clarify what Kant might
have made of a platypus is, disappointingly, summarily dismissed with no more
than the banal assertion that Kant would have recognised it as a living creature
but could not have foreseen the final results of scientists' negotiations.
Perhaps significantly, problems would have arisen for Kant only on Eco's forced,
empirical account of the Kantian notion of schema as a static 3D mental image,
but not on Kant's own conceptual account of the schema as a sort of dynamic
model-constructing capacity produced by the imagination.
Extending
these two accounts of the schema for his own purposes, Eco posits a cognitive
type to cover both the individual and social processes of constructing unknown
objects, stressing that such processes are invariably characterised by constant
negotiation which, again, cannot disregard certain perceptive data. Nuclear
content and molar content, designating respectively our shared public knowledge
and more comprehensive knowledge of such objects, complete Eco's tripartite
theory of meaning. All the traditional problems of analytic philosophy including
meaning and reference, he concludes, can now be more profitably
"re-read" on the basis of this contractual notion.
Such
delightfully narrated tales as "Montezuma and the horses", "Marco
Polo and the unicorn" and "Archangel Gabriel", enthusiastically
recounted as thought experiments in the analytic tradition with the purpose of
throwing light on naming and perception, counterbalance Eco's deep-seated
misgivings about analytic philosophy and contribute to the overall impression
that his is something of a love-hate relationship.
Finally,
in the second of two appendices, Eco attempts to banish the spirit of Croce,
Italy's 20th-century philosopher par excellence, describing him as a master of
oratory and style whose beauty of expression is such that it unfailingly
convinces the reader of its truth, while at the same time masking unresolved
contradictions beneath the surface. It is paradoxical that Eco alone does not
see that he could also be describing himself.
Domenico
Pacitti is an international journalist and academic who lives in Tuscany.
Note: This review was first published in a 'philosophy focus' special by The Times Higher Education Supplement (London) on January 22 1999.
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