What follows is a lecture on Human Values delivered by Umberto Eco at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, on March 7 and 8, 1990
Interpretation and Overinterpretation:
World, History, Texts
by Umberto Eco
In 1957 J. M. Castillet wrote a book entitled La hora del lector (The time of the reader). He was a prophet, indeed. In 1962 I wrote my Opera aperta. In that book I advocated the active role of the interpreter in the reading of texts endowed with aesthetic value. When those pages were written, my readers mainly focused on the “open” side of the whole business, underestimating the fact that the open-ended reading I was supporting was an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a work. In other words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed.
In my more recent writings (A Theory O f Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Langauge) I elaborated on the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis. In my presentation at the Peirce’s International Congress at Harvard University (September 1989) I tried to show that the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria. To say that interpretation (as the basic feature of semiosis) is potentially unlimited does not mean that interpretation has no object and that it “riverruns” merely for its own sake. To say that a text has potentially no end does not mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy end.
Some contemporary theories of criticism assert that the only reliable reading of a text is a misreading, that the only existence of a text is given by the chain of responses it elicits, and that, as maliciously suggested by Tzvetan Todorov (quoting Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg apropos of Jakob Boehme), a text is only a picnic where the author brings the words and the reader brings the sense.
Even if that were true, the words brought by the author are a rather embarrassing bunch of material evidences that the reader cannot pass over in silence, or in noise. If I remember correctly, it was in this country [England] that somebody suggested, years ago, that it is possible to do things with words. To interpret a text means to explain why these words can do various things (and not others) through the way they are interpreted. But if Jack the Ripper told us that he did what he did on the grounds of his interpretation of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, I suspect that many reader-oriented critics would be inclined to think that he read Saint Luke in a pretty preposterous way. Non-reader-oriented
critics would say that Jack the Ripper was deadly mad — and I confess that, even though feeling very sympathetic with the reader-oriented paradigm, and even though I read David Cooper, Ronald Laing, and Felix Guattari, much to my regret I would agree that Jack the Ripper needed medical care.
I understand that my example is rather farfetched and that even the most radical deconstructionist would agree (I hope, but who knows?) with me. Nevertheless I think that even such a paradoxical argument must be taken seriously. It proves that there is at least one case in which it is possible to say that a given interpretation is a bad one. In terms of Karl Popper’s theory of scientific research, this is enough to disprove the hypothesis that interpretation has no public criteria (at least statistically speaking).
One can object that the only alternative to a radical readeroriented theory of interpretation is the one extolled by those who say that the only valid interpretation aims at finding the original intention of the author. In some of my recent writings I have suggested that between the intention of the author (very difficult to find out and frequently irrelevant for the interpretation of a text) and the intention of the interpreter who (to quote Richard Rorty) simply “beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose,” there is a third possibility. There is an intention of the text.
World, History, Texts
by Umberto Eco
I. INTERPRETATION AND HISTORY
(reference notes omitted)
In 1957 J. M. Castillet wrote a book entitled La hora del lector (The time of the reader). He was a prophet, indeed. In 1962 I wrote my Opera aperta. In that book I advocated the active role of the interpreter in the reading of texts endowed with aesthetic value. When those pages were written, my readers mainly focused on the “open” side of the whole business, underestimating the fact that the open-ended reading I was supporting was an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a work. In other words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed.
In my more recent writings (A Theory O f Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Langauge) I elaborated on the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis. In my presentation at the Peirce’s International Congress at Harvard University (September 1989) I tried to show that the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria. To say that interpretation (as the basic feature of semiosis) is potentially unlimited does not mean that interpretation has no object and that it “riverruns” merely for its own sake. To say that a text has potentially no end does not mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy end.
Even if that were true, the words brought by the author are a rather embarrassing bunch of material evidences that the reader cannot pass over in silence, or in noise. If I remember correctly, it was in this country [England] that somebody suggested, years ago, that it is possible to do things with words. To interpret a text means to explain why these words can do various things (and not others) through the way they are interpreted. But if Jack the Ripper told us that he did what he did on the grounds of his interpretation of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, I suspect that many reader-oriented critics would be inclined to think that he read Saint Luke in a pretty preposterous way. Non-reader-oriented
critics would say that Jack the Ripper was deadly mad — and I confess that, even though feeling very sympathetic with the reader-oriented paradigm, and even though I read David Cooper, Ronald Laing, and Felix Guattari, much to my regret I would agree that Jack the Ripper needed medical care.
I understand that my example is rather farfetched and that even the most radical deconstructionist would agree (I hope, but who knows?) with me. Nevertheless I think that even such a paradoxical argument must be taken seriously. It proves that there is at least one case in which it is possible to say that a given interpretation is a bad one. In terms of Karl Popper’s theory of scientific research, this is enough to disprove the hypothesis that interpretation has no public criteria (at least statistically speaking).
One can object that the only alternative to a radical readeroriented theory of interpretation is the one extolled by those who say that the only valid interpretation aims at finding the original intention of the author. In some of my recent writings I have suggested that between the intention of the author (very difficult to find out and frequently irrelevant for the interpretation of a text) and the intention of the interpreter who (to quote Richard Rorty) simply “beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose,” there is a third possibility. There is an intention of the text.
In the course of my second and third lectures I shall try to make clear what I mean by intention of the text (or intentio operis, as opposed to — or interacting with — the intentio auctoris and the intentio lectoris). During the present lecture I would like, on the contrary, to revisit the archaic roots of the contemporary debate on the meaning (or the plurality of meanings, or the absence of any transcendental meaning) of a text. Let me, for the moment, blur the distinction between literary and everyday texts, as well as the difference between texts as images of the world and the natural world as (according to a venerable tradition) a Great Text to be deciphered.
Let me, for the moment, start an archaeological trip which, at first glance, would lead us very far away from contemporary theories of textual interpretation. You will see at the end that, on the contrary, most so-called postmodern thought will look very pre-antique.
In 1987 I was invited by the directors of the Frankfort Bookfair to give an introductory lecture, and the directors of the Bookfair proposed to me (probably believing that this was a really up-to-date subject) a reflection on modern irrationalism. I started by remarking that it is difficult to define irrationalism without having some philosophical concept of reason. Unfortunately, the whole history of Western philosophy serves to prove that such a definition is rather controversial. Any way of thinking is always seen as irrational by the historical model of another way of thinking, which views itself as rational. Aristotle’s logic is not the same as Hegel’s; ratio, ragione, raison, reason, and Vernuft do not mean the same thing.
One way of understanding philosophical concepts is often to come back to the common sense of dictionaries. In German I find that the synonyms of irrational are unsinnig, unlogisch, unvernuftig,
sinnlos; in English they are senseless, absurd, nonsensical, incoherent, delirious, farfetched, inconsequential, disconnected, illogic, exorbitant, extravagant, skimble-skamble. These meanings
seem too strong or too weak to define respectable philosophical standpoints. Nonetheless, they indicate something going beyond a limit set by a standard. One of the antonyms of unreasonableness
(according to Roget’s Thesaurus) is moderateness. Being moderate means being within the modus — that is, within limits and within measure.
The word reminds us of two rules we have inherited from the ancient Greek and Latin civilizations : the logic principle of modus ponens and the ethical principle formulated by Horace: “est modus
in rebus, sunt certi denique fines quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum [There is a measure for everything. There are precise limits one cannot cross].”
At this point I understood that the Latin notion of modus was rather important, if not for determining the difference between rationalism and irrationalism, at least for isolating two basic interpretative
attitudes, that is, two ways of deciphering either a text as a world or the world as a text.
For Greek rationalism, from Plato to Aristotle and others, knowledge meant understanding causes. In this way, defining God meant defining a cause, beyond which there could be no further cause.
To be able to define the world in terms of causes, it is essential to develop the idea of a unilinear chain: if a movement goes from A to B, then there is no force on earth that will be able to make it
go from B to A. In order to be able to justify the unilinear nature of the causal chain, it is first necessary to assume a number of principles: the principle of identity (A=A) , the principle of noncontradiction (it is impossible for something both to be A and not to be A at the same time) and the principle of the excluded middle (either A is true or A is false and tertium non datur). From these
principles we derive the typical pattern of thinking of Western rationalism, the modus ponens: “if p then q; but p: therefore q.”
Even if these principles do not provide for the recognition of a physical order to the world, they do at least provide for a social contract. Latin rationalism adopts the principles of Greek rationalism
but transforms and enriches them in a legal and contractual sense. The legal standard is modus, but the modus is also the limit, the boundaries.
The Latin obsession with spatial limits goes right back to the legend of the foundation of Rome: Romulus draws a boundary line and kills his brother for failing to respect it. If boundaries are
not recognized, then there can be no civitas.
Horatius becomes a hero because he manages to hold the enemy on the border — a bridge thrown up between the Romans and the Others. Bridges are sacrilegious because they span the sulcus, the moat of water delineating the city boundaries: for this reason, they may be built only under the close, ritual control of the Pontifex. The ideology of the Pax Romana and Caesar Augustus’s political design are based on a precise definition of boundaries: the force of the empire is in knowing on which borderline, between which limen, or threshold, the defensive line should be set up. If the time ever comes when there is no longer a clear definition of boundaries, and the barbarians (nomads who have abandoned their original territory and who move about on any territory as if it were their own, ready to abandon that too) succeed in imposing their nomadic view, then Rome will be finished and the capital of the empire can just as well be somewhere else.
Julius Caesar, in crossing the Rubicon, not only knows that he is committing sacrilege but knows that, once he has committed it, then he can never turn back. Alea iacta est. In point of fact, there
are also limits in time. What has been done can never be erased. Time is irreversible. This principle was to govern Latin syntax. The direction and sequence of tenses, which is cosmological linearity,
makes itself a system of logical subordinations in the consecutio temporum. That masterpiece of factual realism which is the absolute ablative establishes that, once something has been done, or presupposed, then it may never again be called into question.
In a Quaestio quodlibetalis, Thomas Aquinas (5.2.3) wonders whether “utrum Deus possit virginem reparare” — in other words, whether a woman who has lost her virginity can be returned to her
original undefiled condition. Thomas’s answer is clear. God may forgive and thus return the virgin to a state of grace and may, by performing a miracle, give her back her bodily integrity. But even
God cannot cause what has been not to have been, because such a violation of the laws of time would be contrary to his very nature. God cannot violate the logical principle whereby “p has occurred” and “p has not occurred” would appear to be in contradiction. Alea iacta est.
This model of Greek and Latin rationalism is the one that still dominates mathematics, logic, science, and computer programming. But it is not the whole story of what we call the Greek legacy. Aristotle was Greek but so were the Eleusinian mysteries. The Greek world is continuously attracted by apeiron (infinity). Infinity is that which has no modus. It escapes the norm.
Fascinated by infinity, Greek civilization, alongside the concept of identity and noncontradiction, constructs the idea of continuous metamorphosis, symbolized by Hermes. Hermes is volatile and
ambiguous, he is father of all the arts but also God of robbers — young and old at the same time. In the myth of Hermes we find the negation of the principle of identity, of noncontradiction, and of the excluded middle, and the causal chains wind back on themselves in spirals, the after precedes the before, the god knows no spatial limits and may, in different shapes, be in different places at the same time.
Hermes is triumphant in the second century after Christ. The second century is a period of political order and peace, and all the peoples of the empire are apparently united by a common language
and culture. The order is such that no one can any longer hope to change it with any form of military or political operation. It is the time when the concept of enkyklios paideia, of general education, is defined, the aim of which is to produce a type of complete man, versed in all the disciplines. This knowledge, however, describes a perfect, coherent world, whereas the world of the second century is a melting pot of races and languages, a crossroad of peoples and ideas, one where all gods are tolerated. These gods had formerly had a deep meaning for the people worshiping them, but when the empire swallowed up their countries, it also dissolved their identity: there are no longer any differences between Isis, Astartes, Demetra, Cybele, Anaitis, and Maia.
We have all heard the legend of the caliph who ordered the destruction of the library in Alexandria, arguing that either the books said the same thing as the Koran, in which case they were superfluous, or they said something different, in which case, they were wrong and harmful. The caliph knew and possessed the truth and he judged the books on the basis of that truth. Second-century Hermetism, on the other hand, is looking for a truth it does not know, and all it possesses is books. Therefore, it imagines or hopes that each book will contain a spark of truth and that they will serve to confirm each other. In this syncretistic dimension, one of the principles of Greek rationalist models, that of the excluded middle, enters a crisis. It is possible for many things to be true at the same time, even if they contradict each other.
But if books tell the truth, even when they contradict each other, then their each and every word must be an allusion, an allegory. They are saying something other than what they appear to be saying. Each one of them contains a message that none of them will ever be able to reveal alone. In order to be able to understand the mysterious message contained in books, it was necessary to look for a revelation beyond human utterances, one which would come announced by divinity itself, using the vehicle of vision, dream, or oracle. But such an unprecedented revelation, never heard before, would have to speak of an as yet unknown god and of a still-secret truth. Secret knowledge is deep knowledge (because only what is lying under the surface can remain unknown for long). Thus truth becomes identified with what is not said or what is said obscurely and must be understood beyond or beneath the surface of a text. The gods speak (today we would say: the Being is speaking) through hieroglyphic and enigmatic messages.
By the way, if the search for a different truth is born of a mistrust of the classical Greek heritage, then any true knowledge will have to be more archaic. It lies among the remains of civilizations that the fathers of Greek rationalism had ignored. Truth is something we have been living with from the beginning of time, except that we have forgotten it. If we have forgotten it, then someone must have saved it for us and it must be someone whose words we are no longer capable of understanding, So this knowledge must be exotic. Carl Jung has explained how it is that once any divine image has become too familiar to us and has lost its mystery, we then need to turn to images of other civilizations, because only exotic symbols are capable of maintaining an “aura” of sacredness.
For the second century, this secret knowledge would thus have been in the hands either of the Druids, the Celtic priests, or wise men from the East, who spoke incomprehensible tongues.
Classical rationalism identified barbarians with those who could not even speak properly (that is actually the etymology of barbaros — one who stutters). Now, turning things around, it is the supposed stuttering of the foreigner that becomes the sacred language, full of promises and silent revelations. Whereas for Greek rationalism a thing was true if it could be explained, a true thing was now mainly something that could not be explained.
But what was this mysterious knowledge possessed by the barbarians’ priests? The widespread opinion was that they knew the secret links that connected the spiritual world to the astral world
and the latter to the sublunar world, which meant that by acting on a plant it was possible to influence the course of the stars, that the course of the stars affected the fate of terrestrial beings, and that the magic operations performed about the image of a god would force that god to follow our volition. As here below, so in heaven above. The universe becomes one big hall of mirrors, where any one individual object both reflects and signifies all the others.
It is possible to speak of universal sympathy and likeness only if, at the same time, the principle of noncontradiction is rejected. Universal sympathy is brought about by a godly emanation in the
world, but at the origin of the emanation there is an unknowable One, who is the very seat of the contradiction itself. Neoplatonic Christian thought will try to explain that we cannot define God in
clear-cut terms on account of the inadequacy of our language. Hermetic thought states that our language, the more ambiguous and multivalent it is, and the more it uses symbols and metaphors,
the more it is particularly appropriate for naming a Oneness in which the coincidence of opposites occurs. But where the coincidence of opposites triumphs, the principle of identity collapses.
As a consequence, interpretation is infinite. The attempt to look for a final, unattainable meaning leads to the acceptance of a never-ending drift or sliding of meaning. A plant is not defined in
terms of its morphological and functional characteristics but on the basis of its resemblance, albeit only partial, to another element in the cosmos. It is vaguely like part of the human body; it has
meaning because it refers to the body. But that part of the body has meaning because it refers to a star, and the latter has meaning because it refers to a musical scale, and this in turn because it
refers to a hierarchy of angels, and so on ad infinitum.
(continues...)
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