Truth, then, becomes “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,” produced poetically, only to become fossilized into knowledge, “illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions” (ibid.: 146), coins whose images has been rubbed away and are now considered simply as pieces of metal and no longer as coins. We thus become accustomed to lying according to convention, having reduced the metaphors to schemata and concepts. Thence a pyramidal order of castes and ranks, laws and delimitations, entirely constructed by language, an immense “Roman columbarium” of concepts, the graveyard of intuition.
No question but that this is a fascinating account of how the edifice of language regiments the landscape of the world, but Nietzsche fails to consider two intuitively evident phenomena. One is that, if we adapt ourselves to the constrictions of the columbarium, we can still manage to give some kind of account of the World (if someone goes to see a doctor and tells him he has been bitten by a dog, the doctor knows what sort of injection to give him, even if he is not familiar with the particular dog that bit him). The other is that every now and then the World forces us to adapt the columbarium, or even to choose an alternative model to the columbarium (which is, at the end of the day, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms).
Nietzsche is undeniably cognizant of the existence of natural constrictions and can see a way to change. The constrictions seem to him to be “terrible forces” that constantly press upon us, countering “scientific” truths with other truths of a different nature; but he evidently refuses to recognize them by conceptualizing them in their turn, given that it is in order to escape them that we have wrought, by way of a defense, our conceptual suit of armor. Change is possible, though not in the form of tinkering with the structure, but instead in the form of a permanent poetic revolution: “if each of us still had a different kind of sensuous perception, if we ourselves could only perceive now 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 even to hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming to laws” (ibid.: 149).
Therefore, art (and with it myth) “constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; 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 dream” (ibid.: 151).
If these are the premises, our first option would be to reject what surrounds us (and the way in which we vainly try to reduce it to order) and take refuge in dreams as a flight from reality. Nietzsche in fact cites Pascal, for whom, in order to be happy, all it would take would be to dream every night of being king, but he then admits that this dominion of art over life, however delightful, would be a deception. Otherwise, and this is what Nietzsche’s heirs have taken as the real lesson, art can say what it says because it is Being itself, in its weakness and generosity, that accepts any definition, and takes pleasure from seeing itself seen as changeable, a dreamer, extenuatingly vigorous and victoriously weak, no longer as “fullness, presence or foundation, but rather as fracture, absence of foundation, work and pain” (Vattimo 1993: 73). Being can therefore only be spoken insofar as it is in decline; instead of imposing itself, it withdraws. Thus we have arrived at an “ontology organized into ‘weak’ categories” (ibid.: 5). Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is nothing more than the proclamation of the end of the stable structure of Being (Vattimo 1984: 158). From now on, Being will present itself only “as suspension and withdrawal” (Vattimo 1997: 13).
It is not my intention to discuss whether, from the point of view of weak thought, Being should still be written with a capital B (and in fact Vattimo does not do so). I will stick to the mental experiment previously proposed, and I will speak not of Being but of the World (if “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” [“The world is everything that is the case”—Wittgenstein], and if we call World what happens to be the case). The problem is that what prevents us believing that all points of view are equally valid, that the World is merely the effect of language and, in addition to being malleable and weak, is a mere flatus vocis, and is therefore the work of Poets, characterized as daydreamers, liars, imitators of the nonexistent, capable of irresponsibly placing a horse’s head on a human body and turning every entity into a chimera.
The trouble is, in the first place, that, once we had settled our accounts with the World, we would still find ourselves having to settle them with the subject that emits this flatus vocis (a problem which is in any case the limit of any magic idealism). And, in the second place, if it is a hermeneutic principle that there are no facts, only interpretations, this still does not exclude the possibility of “bad” interpretations. There is no winning hand at poker that has not been put together by a choice of the player (encouraged maybe by chance), but this does not mean that every hand assembled by the player is a winning hand. All it would take is for my opponent to respond to my three aces with a straight flush for my wager to turn out to have been a bad bet. There are times in our game with the World when the World responds to our three aces with a straight flush. Furthermore, there are players who make a bet and are eventually obliged to show a hand that, according to the laws of poker, contains no valid combination of cards: and the others, in unison, observe that the player must be crazy, or doesn’t know how to play, or is bluffing. What is the status of bluffing in a universe in which one interpretation is as good as another? What are the intersubjective criteria that allow us to define that particular combination of cards as off the wall? What criterion allows us to distinguish between dreams, poetic inventions, and LSD trips (there are people who after taking LSD have thrown themselves out of windows convinced they could fly and finished up in a heap on the sidewalk—contrary, mind you, to all their hopes and intentions), and, on the other hand, acceptable statements concerning the things of the physical or historical world that surrounds us?
Let us posit, as Vattimo does (1994: 100), a difference between epistemology, as “the construction of a body of rigorous knowledge and the solution of problems in the light of paradigms that lay down the rules for the verification of propositions” (which seems to correspond to Nietzsche’s picture of the conceptual universe of a given culture) and hermeneutics, as “the activity that takes place during the encounter with different paradigmatic horizons, which do not allow themselves to be assessed on the basis of some kind of conformity (to rules or, in the final analysis, to the thing) but exist as ‘poetic’ proposals of other worlds, of the establishment of new rules” (Vattimo 1997: 79). What new rule should the Community prefer, what rule should it condemn as folly? There are still people hell-bent on demonstrating that the earth is square, that we live not on but beneath its crust, that statues weep, that forks can be bent by television, that the apes are descended from man—and we have to come up with a public criterion by which to judge whether their ideas are in some way acceptable.