I haven’t bought that one yet. I understand, from the reviews, that it promises, in the form of a novel, to finally synthesize his view of things into an understandable form. The man is 80 years old, after all, and still teaching. But ‘understandable’ is also a relative term, since the novels have only been the narrative and rather experimental expression of a lifetime of learning and thinking that is often (in his non-fiction writings) so dense and beyond common comprehension that one’s brain ends up bruised even in the third re-reading of it.
As a semiologist and philosopher, he uses words and symbolic expression with the accuracy of a surgeon, and as an historian and classical scholar he seldom stumbles. Without a grounding in Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, Noam Chomsky, and, in the modern age, Steven Pinker, among many others (Pettit springs immediately to mind) it is nearly impossible to decipher the real meaning of a single sentence. For Eco, it is all just a fun game of challenging us to keep up. I’ll readily admit that I often fail that test.
I’ve read every bit of ‘The Semiotic Challenge’ five times, and I’m still struck cold when I run into lines from Eco like this: “As they are optative possibilia, these individual things might also (successively) not exist: but references to possibilia can be made. Is it possible to make references to impossibilia or, in any event, to inconceivable objects?” Ten years I’ve been banging my head against that one (from ‘Kant and the Platypus’), and the question itself is so filled with danger that it almost can’t be answered.
On the surface, he asks one to make a distinction, which is necessarily personal, between what is possible and what is not. But then it gets ugly, as you parse the thought – what really is the possible? Allowing references to the possible forces one to define just what is possible. I’ve never seen a unicorn, or an elf, or a Sasquatch, or a UFO, but are those things among the possibilia? Or are they among the ‘optative possibilia,’ which might exist, and be referred to as though they do, with no evidence of same? They might not exist, he suggests, but they also might. So common discourse seems to allow references to things that may not exist, but that folks might include among the ‘possible.’
But what of the impossible? And here he merely asks the question, and leaves it to the reader to answer – Can one (legitimately) make reference to the inconceivable? And here the question becomes less simple, and becomes rather murky – If one’s definition of something is that it cannot be understood, that thing fails the test of the ‘possibilia.’ If something is ‘inconceivable,’ then it is. Not conceivable. It would be rather odd to begin to assign attributes and characteristics to something that one cannot include among the conceivable. Defining anything at all as ‘beyond our understanding’ makes that thing inconceivable, and delegitimizes any reference to that thing by the simple lack of an operative (optative) definition. If something IS simply by declaration, and cannot be demonstrated in any other way, then it is almost a sure thing that that thing is not. Existence tends to require existence.
I won’t include myself among those who are advancing the upper echelons of rational thinking, nor dare to assert that I know one hundredth of what Eco knows, but that doesn’t prevent me from continuing to learn and think on my own, separate from what self-interested ‘preachers’ would like me to swallow. Possible. Impossible. They are opposite propositions, and allow for no middle ground.
As a semiologist and philosopher, he uses words and symbolic expression with the accuracy of a surgeon, and as an historian and classical scholar he seldom stumbles. Without a grounding in Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, Noam Chomsky, and, in the modern age, Steven Pinker, among many others (Pettit springs immediately to mind) it is nearly impossible to decipher the real meaning of a single sentence. For Eco, it is all just a fun game of challenging us to keep up. I’ll readily admit that I often fail that test.
I’ve read every bit of ‘The Semiotic Challenge’ five times, and I’m still struck cold when I run into lines from Eco like this: “As they are optative possibilia, these individual things might also (successively) not exist: but references to possibilia can be made. Is it possible to make references to impossibilia or, in any event, to inconceivable objects?” Ten years I’ve been banging my head against that one (from ‘Kant and the Platypus’), and the question itself is so filled with danger that it almost can’t be answered.
On the surface, he asks one to make a distinction, which is necessarily personal, between what is possible and what is not. But then it gets ugly, as you parse the thought – what really is the possible? Allowing references to the possible forces one to define just what is possible. I’ve never seen a unicorn, or an elf, or a Sasquatch, or a UFO, but are those things among the possibilia? Or are they among the ‘optative possibilia,’ which might exist, and be referred to as though they do, with no evidence of same? They might not exist, he suggests, but they also might. So common discourse seems to allow references to things that may not exist, but that folks might include among the ‘possible.’
But what of the impossible? And here he merely asks the question, and leaves it to the reader to answer – Can one (legitimately) make reference to the inconceivable? And here the question becomes less simple, and becomes rather murky – If one’s definition of something is that it cannot be understood, that thing fails the test of the ‘possibilia.’ If something is ‘inconceivable,’ then it is. Not conceivable. It would be rather odd to begin to assign attributes and characteristics to something that one cannot include among the conceivable. Defining anything at all as ‘beyond our understanding’ makes that thing inconceivable, and delegitimizes any reference to that thing by the simple lack of an operative (optative) definition. If something IS simply by declaration, and cannot be demonstrated in any other way, then it is almost a sure thing that that thing is not. Existence tends to require existence.
I won’t include myself among those who are advancing the upper echelons of rational thinking, nor dare to assert that I know one hundredth of what Eco knows, but that doesn’t prevent me from continuing to learn and think on my own, separate from what self-interested ‘preachers’ would like me to swallow. Possible. Impossible. They are opposite propositions, and allow for no middle ground.
