I want you to think for a moment about the image of Magritte’s Absolute Knowledge, as a sort of morale booster. You must be prepared for anything in this next hour, because a serious lecture on the concepts of the absolute and the relative would have to last at least two thousand five hundred years—just as long as they have been debated in reality. I have long asked myself what the term “absolute” means; it is the most elementary question a philosopher should pose.
I went to look for images by artists that refer to the absolute, and—as well as the fine Magritte, which however does not tell me a lot in a philosophical sense—I found others: Painting the Absolute, Quéte d’absolu, In Search of the Absolute, and Marcheur d’absolu, not to mention advertisements using the term, with their images of Absolu by Valentino, Absolut vodka, and Absolu mincemeat. It would seem that the absolute is a big seller.
Moreover, the notion of the absolute brought to mind one of its opposites—namely, the notion of the relative. This has become a rather fashionable term since prominent churchmen and even secular thinkers launched a campaign against so-called “relativism”—which has in turn become a disparaging term used for almost terroristic purposes, rather like the way Silvio Berlusconi uses the word “communism.” I set myself the task, therefore, not to clarify your ideas but to muddle them up, by trying to show how ambiguous these terms are—according to the circumstances and context, they mean very different things among themselves—and to suggest that they should not be used like baseball bats.
According to dictionaries of philosophy, the absolute is all that is ab solutus, free of all bonds or limits. It does not depend on something else, but holds within itself its own reason, cause, and explanation. This is something, therefore, very close to God, whose own self-definition, “I am who I am,” cast everything else as contingent. That is to say, none of the rest has its own cause within itself and, although by some accident it came to exist, it could just as well not exist, or could no longer exist tomorrow—and this is the case for the solar system and for all of us.
As we are contingent beings, and therefore destined to die, we have a desperate desire to be anchored to something that does not perish—something absolute. But this absolute can be transcendent, like the biblical divinity, or immanent—to invoke the theory of a Spinoza or Giordano Bruno. According to idealist philosophers (F. W. J. von Schelling, for example), we too become part of the absolute because the absolute is the indissoluble unity of the subject that knows and that which was once considered to be extraneous to the subject—for example, nature or the world. In the absolute, we identify with God and are part of something that is not yet fully complete: process, development, infinite growth, and infinite self-definition. But if that is how things stand, we could never either define or know the absolute because we are part of it; trying to conceive of it would be like Baron Münchausen dragging himself out of a swamp by his own hair.
So the alternative is to think of the absolute as something we are not and that lies elsewhere, not dependent on us—like Aristotle’s God, who thinks of himself thinking and who, as Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” As a matter of fact, in the fifteenth-century work De docta ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa had already said: Deus est absolutus.
But in Nicholas’s view, insofar as God is absolute, God can never be reached. The relationship between our awareness and God is the same as the one between an inscribed polygon and the circumference within which it is inscribed: as the sides of the polygon gradually multiply, we get closer and closer to the circumference, but the polygon and the circumference will never be equal. Nicholas said that God is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Is it possible to conceive of a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere? Evidently not. Yet we can describe it, and that is what I am doing right now, and you all understand that I am talking about something that has to do with geometry, except that it is geometrically impossible and unimaginable. So there is a difference between being able to conceive something or not and being able to describe it and attribute some meaning to it.
What does it mean to use a word and give it a meaning? It means a lot of things.
A splendid case in which I know the properties A, B, C, and D was provided by C. S. Peirce, who defined lithium this way:
If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind he will tell you that if you search among minerals that are vitreous, translucent, grey or white, very hard, brittle, and insoluble, for one which imparts a crimson tinge to an unluminous flame, this mineral being triturated with lime or witherite rats-bane, and then fused, can be partly dissolved in muriatic acid; and if this solution be evaporated, and the residue be extracted with sulfuric acid, and duly purified, it can be converted by ordinary methods into a chloride, which being obtained in the solid state, fused, and electrolyzed with half a dozen powerful cells, will yield a globule of a pinkish silvery metal that will float on gasoline; and the material of that is a specimen of lithium. The peculiarity of this definition—or rather this precept which is more serviceable than a definition—is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes, by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word.
This is a fine example of a complete and satisfactory representation of the meaning of a term. But other expressions instead have fuzzy, imprecise meanings—and diminishing degrees of clarity. For example, even the expression the highest even number has a meaning; we immediately know that it would have to have the property of being divisible by two (and so we would be able to distinguish it from the highest odd number) and we even possess a vague instrument for producing it, in the sense that we can imagine counting higher and higher numbers, separating the odd ones from the even ones. It’s just that we realize we will never manage to do that—in the way that in a dream we sometimes have a sense that we can grasp something but are not quite able to do so. An expression such as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere instead suggests no rule for the production of a corresponding object; not only does it not support any definition, it also defies all our efforts to imagine it, apart from making our head spin. All things considered, the definition of a term such as absolute is tautological—something that is not contingent is absolute, but something that is not absolute is contingent—but it does not suggest descriptions, definitions, and classifications. We cannot think of instructions for the production of a corresponding thing. We know none of its properties, except to suppose that it has them all—and that it is probably the id cuius nihil maius cogitari possit (something compared to which nothing greater can be thought) that Saint Anselm of Canterbury talked about. (And this, by the way, reminds me of a comment attributed to Arthur Rubinstein: “Do I believe in God? No, I believe in something much greater.”) The best we can manage to imagine in trying to conceive of God is the reduction of the world’s variety into what Hegel ridiculed as a “night in which all cows are black.”
It is certainly possible not only to name but also to represent visually those things that we cannot conceive. But these images do not represent the inconceivable: they simply invite us to try to imagine something inconceivable, and then frustrate our expectations. What we feel in trying to understand them is precisely the sense of powerlessness expressed by Dante in the last canto of the Paradiso (XXXIII, 82–86) where he would like to tell us what he saw when he was able to look upon the divinity, but all he can manage to say is that he cannot put it into words, and he falls back on the intriguing metaphor of a book with an infinite number of pages:
O grace abounding, by which I have dared
To fix my eyes through the eternal Light
So deeply that my sight was spent in it!
Within its depths I saw gathered together,
Bound by love into a single volume,
Leaves that lie scattered through the universe.
Substance and accidents and their relations
I saw as though they fused in such a way
That what I say is but a gleam of light.
The universal pattern of this knot
I believe I saw, because in telling this,
I feel my gladness growing ever larger.
One moment made more slip my memory than
Twenty-five centuries reft from the adventure
That awed Neptune with the shadow of the Argo.
Nor is this any different from the feeling of impotence expressed by Giacomo Leopardi when he describes the infinite (“thus my mind sinks into this immensity / and sweet it is to founder in this sea”). This is reminiscent of a Romantic painter such as Caspar David Friedrich when he tried to express the sublime, which was the earthly thing best able to call up the experience of the absolute.
In times long gone by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite wrote that, since the divine One is so far from us as not to be either understood or reached, we must perforce talk about it through metaphors and allusions, but especially, owing to the poverty of our language, through negative symbols and dissimilar expressions: “The lowest images are also used, such as fragrant ointment, or the cornerstone, and they even give It the forms of wild animals and liken It to the lion and panther, or name It a leopard, or a raging bear bereaved of its young” (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy, book II).
Some naive philosophers have suggested that poets alone can tell us what being and the absolute may be, but all they are really expressing is the indefinite. This was the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé, who spent a lifetime trying to provide an “orphic explanation of the world.” “I say a flower, and beyond the oblivion whence my voice relegates all shapes, insofar as it is something other than any known calyx, there arises musically a pleasant idea, the absence of all bouquets and fragrance.” In point of fact this statement is untranslatable; all it tells us is that a word is selected, detached from the white space surrounding it, and from it the totality of the unsaid must spring, but in the form of an absence. “To nominate an object is to suppress three-quarters of the power of poetry, which is all about working things out gradually: to suggest, that is the dream.” Mallarmé spent all his life in the quest for this dream, but it never came true. Dante had taken this problem for granted right from the start, understanding as he did that it would take the pride of Lucifer to claim to express the infinite in finite terms, and he avoided this problem of poetry by making the poetry of the problem, not the poetry of the unsayable but the poetry of the impossibility of saying it.
We should consider the fact that Dante (like Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa) was a believer. Is it possible to believe in an absolute and state that it is unthinkable and undefinable? Of course, by accepting the substitution of the impossible thought of the absolute with the feeling of the absolute and hence of faith, since “faith is the substance of things that are hoped for and the evidence of things that are not seen.” During a conference, Elie Wiesel quoted Kafka’s observation that it is possible to talk with God but not about God. While for philosophers the absolute is a night in which all cows are black, for the mystic who, like Saint John of the Cross (sixteenth century), saw it as noche oscura (“Oh night that guided me / oh night more lovely than the dawn”), it is the source of ineffable emotions. Saint John of the Cross expresses his mystical experience through poetry: faced with the indescribable nature of the absolute, we might find comfort in the fact that this unsatisfied tension may resolve itself materially in a finished form. And this allowed Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) to see beauty as a substitute for the experience of the absolute: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
This is fine for those who have decided to practice an aesthetic religion. But Saint John of the Cross would have told us that it was only his mystical experience of the absolute that guaranteed him the sole possible truth. This has led many persons of faith to maintain that philosophical systems that reject any possibility of knowing the absolute automatically reject all criteria of truth or, by not accepting an absolute criterion of truth, they reject the possibility of any experience of the absolute. But it is one thing to say that a philosophical system does not accept any possibility of knowing the absolute and another to say that it rejects all criteria of truth—even for matters concerning the contingent world. Are truth and the experience of the absolute so inseparable?
The belief that some things are true is of fundamental importance for the survival of humankind. If we did not think that the things other people tell us can be either true or false, society would be impossible. We could not even rule out the idea that a box with “aspirin” written on it might contain strychnine instead.
A specular theory of truth is adaequatio rei et intellectus (the adequation of the intellect and the thing), as if our mind were a mirror that, when working properly and not a distorting one or misted over, must faithfully reflect things as they are. This is the theory put forward by Thomas Aquinas, for example, but also by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). And since Aquinas could not have been a Leninist, it follows that when it came to philosophy, Lenin was a Neo-Thomist. But, with the exception of ecstatic states, we are obliged to speak and to say what our intellect reflects. Hence we define as true (or false) not things but the assertions we make about how things are. According to Alfred Tarski’s famous definition, the statement “snow is white” is only true if the snow is white. Now, if we forget the whiteness of snow for a moment, because the way things are going it has become a highly debatable subject, we might consider another example: the statement “it’s raining” (between quote marks) is true only if outside it is actually raining (without quote marks).
The first part of the definition (the one between quote marks) is a verbal statement and represents nothing other than itself, but the second part ought to express how things actually are. But what ought to be a state of things is once more expressed in words. To avoid this linguistic mediation we should say that “it’s raining” (between quote marks) is true if “that thing there” (while pointing to the falling rain without saying a word). But, while we can make this indexical appeal to the senses with the rain, it would be harder to do the same thing with the statement “the Earth revolves around the sun” (because if anything our senses would tell us the exact opposite).
To establish whether the statement corresponds to a state of things, we first need to interpret the term to rain and stipulate a definition for it. We need to establish that in order to state that it is raining it is not enough to notice drops of water falling from above, because it may be that someone is watering flowers on a balcony; second, the consistency of the drops must be of a certain size, otherwise we would talk of dew or frost; third, the sensation must be constant (otherwise we would say that it tried to rain but stopped right away), and so on. This having been established, we must move on to an empirical test, which in the case of rain is available to all (you just hold out your hand and trust in your senses).
But in the case of the statement “the Earth revolves around the sun,” the verification procedure is more complex. What is the meaning of the word true in each of the following statements?
Statements 1 and 2 express subjective facts, but a bellyache is an evident feeling that cannot be suppressed whereas, in recalling a dream of the night before, I might not be sure of the accuracy of my recollections. In addition, the two statements cannot be immediately verified by others. Of course, a doctor who wants to know if I really have colitis or if I am a hypochondriac would have the means to check that out. But if I told a psychoanalyst I had dreamed about Padre Pio, she would have more of a problem, because I could easily be lying.
Statements 3, 4, and 5 are not immediately verifiable. But the chance of rain tomorrow can be verified tomorrow, whereas the idea of the world ending in 2536 would pose us a few problems (and that is why we make a distinction between the credibility of a met office forecaster and that of a prophet). The difference between 4 and 5 is that 4 will become true or false at least in 2536, whereas 5 can never be empirically verified.
Some of these statements are true or false in relation to rules we have established. A right angle only has 90 degrees within the ambit of a system of Euclidean postulates. That water boils at 100 degrees is true not only if we accept a physical law worked out through inductive generalization but also on the basis of the definition of degrees centigrade. An apple is an angiosperm only on the basis of some rules of botanical classification.
Some others require us to trust in matters checked out by others before our time: we believe it to be true that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, because we accept what the history books tell us, but we must always recognize the possibility that some hitherto unknown document might be discovered tomorrow in the archives of the British admiralty that says he died on another date. Sometimes for utilitarian reasons we take as true an idea that we know is false: for example, to find our way in the desert, we behave as if it were true that the sun moves from east to west.
As for statements concerning religion, I don’t think they admit of no resolution. If we accept the Gospels as historically accurate testimony, the proof of Christ’s divinity ought to convince even a Protestant. But this is not the case with the teachings of the Catholic Church. The statement regarding the soul of the embryo depends solely on establishing the meanings of terms such as life, human, and soul. Thomas Aquinas, for example, held that embryos had only a sensitive soul, like the animals, and therefore as they are not yet human beings with a rational soul they will not take part in the resurrection of the flesh. Today he would be accused of heresy, but in that most civilized age they made him a saint.
It is therefore a matter of deciding each time which criteria of truth we are using.
Our sense of tolerance is based on this very recognition of the different degrees of verifiability or acceptability of a truth. I can have the scientific and didactic duty to fail a student who maintains that water boils at 90 degrees like the right angle—this was apparently suggested in an exam—but a Christian would also have to accept that for some people there is no other god than Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet (and Christians expect Muslims to return the compliment).
Instead in the light of some recent polemics it seems that this distinction between different criteria of truth, typical of modern thought and especially of logical-scientific thinking, gives rise to a relativism understood as the historical malady of contemporary culture, which rejects any idea of truth. But what do anti-relativists mean by relativism?
Some encyclopedias of philosophy tell us that there is a cognitive relativism, according to which objects can be known solely under conditions determined by human faculties. But in this sense, Kant, too, would have been a relativist as he never denied that it was possible to state laws of universal value—and, moreover, he believed in God, albeit only on moral grounds.
In another encyclopedia of philosophy I find that relativism means “every concept that does not admit of absolute principles in the field of knowledge and action.” But rejecting absolute principles in the field of knowledge or in the field of action is not the same thing. Some people are prepared to maintain that “pedophilia is a bad thing” is a truth relative only to a particular system of values, since in certain cultures it was or is allowed or tolerated, while claiming nonetheless that Pythagoras’s theorem must be valid for all times and in all cultures.
No one could seriously label Einstein’s theory of relativity as an example of relativism. To say that any measurement of motion depends on how fast or slow the observer is moving is considered to be a valid principle for every human being in every time and in every place.
Relativism as a philosophical doctrine of that name arose together with nineteenth-century positivism, which held that the absolute was unknowable and that at best it could be understood as the constantly fluid limit of ongoing scientific research. But no positivist has ever claimed that objectively verifiable scientific truths valid for everyone cannot be attained.
One philosophical position that, after a hasty reading of the textbooks, could be defined as relativistic is so-called holism, according to which all statements are true or false (and acquire a meaning) only within an organic system of assumptions, a given conceptual scheme or, as others have said, within a given scientific paradigm.
A holist maintains (rightly) that the notion of space has a different meaning in the Aristotelian and Newtonian systems, thus making them incommensurable, and that one scientific system is as good as another to the extent to which it successfully explains a set of phenomena. But holists are the first to tell us that some systems fail to explain a set of phenomena and that in the long term some systems prevail simply because they explain things better than others. So, in their apparent tolerance, holists are faced with something they have to explain and, even when they do not say so, they stick to what I would define as a minimal realism, according to which things must exist or behave in a certain way. Perhaps we will never know how this is, but if we do not believe that it exists, our research would make no sense, nor would it make any sense to keep on trying out new systems for explaining the world.
Holists are usually said to be pragmatists, but in this case, too, we should not read the philosophy textbooks in haste: the true pragmatist, as Charles Sanders Peirce was, did not say that ideas are true only if they show themselves to be effective, but that they show their effectiveness when they are true. And when he supported fallibilism—namely, the possibility that all our knowledge can always be questioned—at the same time he maintained that through the constant correction of knowledge the human community continues to carry “the torch of truth.”
What makes people suspect that these theories are relativistic is the fact that the various systems are mutually incommensurable. The Ptolemaic system is certainly incommensurable with the Copernican one, and only in the former do the notions of epicycle and deferent take on a precise meaning. But the fact that the two systems are incommensurable does not mean they are not comparable, and it is precisely by comparing them that we understand the nature of the celestial phenomena that Ptolemy explained with the notions of epicycle and deferent, and we realize that they were the same phenomena that the Copernicans wanted to explain in accordance with a different conceptual scheme.
Philosophical holism is similar to linguistic holism, according to which the semantic and syntactical structure of a given language imposes a determined world view of which the speaker of that language is, so to speak, a prisoner. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) pointed out, for example, that western languages tend to analyze many events as objects, and an expression such as “three days” is grammatically equivalent to “three apples,” whereas some native American languages are oriented toward the process and see events where we see things—with the result that the Hopi language would be better equipped than English to define certain phenomena studied by modern physicists. Whorf also pointed out that, instead of the word snow, the Eskimos apparently have four different terms according to the consistency of the snow itself and so they would see several different things whereas we see only one. Leaving aside that this idea has been challenged, even a western skier can tell the difference between different kinds of snow with different consistencies, and were an Eskimo to come into contact with us he would understand perfectly well that when we say snow for the presumed four things that he calls by different names, we are behaving just like the Frenchman who uses glace to describe ice, ice lollies, ice cream, mirrors, and window glass, yet in the morning is not such a prisoner of his own language as to shave while looking at himself in an ice cream.
Finally, apart from the fact that not all contemporary thinkers accept the holistic perspective, it is nonetheless in line with all those theories of knowledge according to which reality can be seen from different perspectives and each perspective matches one aspect of it, even if it does not exhaust its unfathomable richness. There is nothing relativistic in maintaining that reality is always defined from a particular (which does not mean subjective and individual) point of view. Nor does asserting that we see it always and only in accordance with a certain description exempt us from believing and hoping that what we are seeing is always the same thing.
Alongside cognitive relativism, the encyclopedias list cultural relativism. That different cultures have not only different languages and mythologies but different moral concepts (all reasonable in their context) was understood, first by Montaigne and then by Locke, when Europe came more critically into contact with other cultures. That primitive tribes in New Guinea still think cannibalism is legitimate and commendable while we in the West do not strikes me as an indisputable observation, as it is equally indisputable that in certain countries adulterers are censured in ways that differ from ours. But, firstly, recognizing the variety of cultures does not mean denying that there are some more universal behaviors (for example, a mother’s love for her children, or the fact that we use the same facial expressions to express disgust or merriment), and secondly, such recognition does not automatically imply moral relativism—that is, the notion that since no ethical values are the same for all cultures we can freely modify our behavior to suit our desires or interests. Recognizing that an other culture is different, and that its diversity must be respected, does not mean abdicating our own cultural identity.
So how did the specter of relativism come to be constructed as a uniform ideology, a blight on contemporary culture?
There is a secular critique of relativism, the main thrust of which addresses the excesses of cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, who presents his ideas in a book written with Joseph Ratzinger, Senza radici (2004), is well aware that there are differences between cultures but he maintains that some values of western culture (such as democracy, the separation of church and state, and liberalism) have proved superior to the values of other cultures. Western civilization has good reason to believe it is more advanced than others with regard to these topics but, in maintaining that this superiority ought to be universally evident, Pera uses a questionable argument. He says: “If members of culture B freely show that they prefer culture A and not vice-versa—if, for example, the flow of migration runs from Islamic countries to the West and not vice-versa—then there is reason to believe that A is better than B.” The argument is weak because in the nineteenth century the Irish did not emigrate en masse to the United States because they preferred that Protestant country to their beloved Catholic Ireland, but because at home they were dying of starvation on account of the potato blight. Pera’s rejection of cultural relativism is dictated by a concern that tolerance for other cultures may degenerate into submissiveness and that the pressure of immigration will lead to the West’s acquiescing to the demands of foreign cultures. Pera’s problem is not the defense of the absolute, but the defense of the West.
In his Contro il relativismo (2005), Giovanni Jervis gives us a relativist who is a strange hybrid made up of a late Romantic, a postmodern thinker with Nietzschean roots, and a disciple of New Age thinking, whose relativism, handily for Jervis’s purposes, looks anti-scientific and irrational. Jervis sees a reactionary streak in cultural relativism: asserting that all forms of society should be respected and justified, even idealized, encourages the segregation of peoples. What’s more, those cultural anthropologists who, rather than attempting to identify the biological characteristics and behavioral constants of populations, have emphasized diversity owed solely to culture—by attaching too much importance to cultural factors and by ignoring biological factors—have again indirectly supported the primacy of spirit over matter, and by so doing they have proved sympathetic to the views of religious thinkers.
This statement should definitely bewilder those believers whose twofold fear is (1) that cultural relativism necessarily leads to moral relativism—as if recognizing the right of Papuan natives to drive spikes through their noses means that people in Ireland have the right to abuse seven-year-old children; and (2) that maintaining there are various ways of ascertaining the truth of a proposition casts doubt on the possibility of recognizing an absolute truth. Clearly this is not true and it has been proved that there are some people who believe that the Virgin Mary really did appear at Lourdes, but at the same time hold that the New Zealand cormorant is a Phalacrocorax carbo only by classificatory convention.
With regard to cultural relativism, in some doctrinal notes on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2002), Joseph Ratzinger, still a cardinal at the time—I choose to challenge cardinals but not popes, given that you never know these days—saw a close relationship between cultural relativism and ethical relativism:
Cultural relativism … shows clear signs of its presence in the theorization and defense of ethical pluralism that sanctions the decadence and dissolution of reason and the principles of the natural moral law. Following this trend it is not unusual, unfortunately, to come across public statements claiming that this ethical pluralism is a condition for democracy.
Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et ratio (September 14, 1998), said:
Forgetting to orient its investigation of being, modern philosophy has concentrated on human knowledge. Instead of working on man’s capacity to know the truth, it has preferred to highlight the limitations and conditioning of that capacity. This has given rise to various forms of agnosticism and relativism, which have led philosophical research to lose itself in the shifting sands of a pervasive skepticism.
And Ratzinger, in a homily of 2003, said: “A dictatorship of relativism is being established, whereby nothing is recognized as definitive and whose sole measure is one’s own ego and desires. We, however, have another measure: the Son of God, the true man.”
Here two notions of truth are in opposition, one as the semantic property of statements and the other as the property of divinity. This is due to the fact that both notions of truth appear in Holy Writ (at least according to the translations through which we know it). Sometimes truth refers to the correspondence between something that is said and the way in which things are (“verily, verily I say unto you,” in the sense of “what I’m saying is true”) and sometimes instead the truth is an intrinsic quality of divinity (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”). This has led many Fathers of the Church to positions that Ratzinger would call relativistic today, since they said that the important thing was not to worry whether a given statement on the world corresponded to the way things were, as long as attention was paid to the only truth worthy of this name, the message of salvation. Saint Augustine, faced with the dispute as to whether the Earth was round or flat, seemed inclined to think it was round, but pointed out that since such knowledge does not serve to save the soul, one theory is practically as good as another.
It is hard to find a definition of truth among Cardinal Ratzinger’s many writings that is other than the truth as revealed and embodied in Christ. But, if the truth of faith is truth revealed, why contrast it with the truth of scientists and philosophers, which is a concept of a different sort and one with different ends? It would suffice to follow Thomas Aquinas who, in his De aeternitate mundi, knowing full well that supporting Averroës’s theory of the eternity of the world was a terrible heresy, accepted through faith that the world was created, but from a cosmological point of view admitted that it was not possible to rationally demonstrate either that it was created or that it was eternal. For Ratzinger, instead, as reported in his Il monoteismo (2002), the essence of all philosophical and modern scientific thinking is that:
the truth as such—so it is thought—cannot be known, and we can go forward little by little only with the small steps of verification and falsification. The tendency to replace the concept of truth with that of consensus is strengthened. But this means that man becomes separated from the truth and hence also from the distinction between good and evil, submitting completely to the principle of the majority.… Man plans and “assembles” the world without preestablished criteria and thus necessarily goes beyond the concept of human dignity, so that even human rights become problematic. In such a conception of reason and rationality there is absolutely no space for the concept of God.
This extrapolation, which moves from a prudent concept of scientific truth as an object of continuous verification and correction to a declaration of the destruction of all human dignity, is untenable; that is to say, it is a position that cannot be defended without identifying all modern thought with the notion that there are no facts but only interpretations, the next step being to claim that existence is devoid of any foundation, that therefore God is dead, and finally that, if God does not exist, then everything is possible.
Neither Ratzinger nor the anti-relativists in general are visionaries or conspiracy theorists. The simple fact is that those anti-relativists I would define as moderates or critics identify their enemy solely with that specific form of extreme relativism according to which there are no facts but only interpretations, while the anti-relativists I define as radicals extend the claim that there are no facts but only interpretations to include all of modern thought, making an error that—at least in the university of my day—would have caused them to fail their history of philosophy exam.
The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations begins with Nietzsche who explained it very clearly in On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense (1896). Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays on conceptual fictions it calls truth. We think we talk about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but these are metaphors that do not correspond to the original entities. Faced with the multiplicity of individual leaves there is no one primordial “leaf,” an “original form according to which all leaves are supposedly woven, sketched, circled off, colored, curled, or painted—but by awkward hands.” Birds and insects perceive the world in ways different than ours, and it makes no sense to say which of those perceptions is the most correct, because that would require a criterion of “right perception” which does not exist. Nature “knows no forms and concepts, and hence not even species, but only an x that is inaccessible and indefinable for us.” Truth, then, becomes “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,” of poetic inventions subsequently hardened into knowledge—illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten, But Nietzsche avoids considering two phenomena. One is that, by falling into line with the constrictions of this dubious knowledge of ours, we manage in some way to deal with nature: if someone has been bitten by a dog, a doctor knows which kind of injection to give, even though she has no knowledge of the particular dog that bit the patient. The other is that, every so often, nature obliges us to recognize that our knowledge is illusory and to choose an alternative form (which is, moreover, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms). Nietzsche saw the presence of natural constrictions that struck him as “terrible powers” which constantly press upon us, challenging our “scientific” truths. But he refused to conceptualize them, seeing that it was to defy them that we constructed conceptual armor to defend ourselves with. Change is possible, not as a restructuring, but as a permanent poetic revolution: “if we had, each taken singly, a varying sensory perception, we could see now like a bird, now like a worm, now like a plant; or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third heard it even as a sound, then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature.”
So, he says, art (and with it, myth) “constantly confuses the categories and cells of the concepts by presenting new transferences, metaphors, and metonyms; constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams.”
If these are the premises, the first possibility would be to take refuge in dreams as an escape from reality. But Nietzsche himself admits that this dominion of art over life would be deceptive, albeit supremely enjoyable. Or—and this is the real lesson that posterity has learned from Nietzsche—art can say what it says because it is Being itself that accepts any definition, because it has no foundation. For Nietzsche, this fading away of Being coincided with the death of God. And this allowed some believers to draw a false Dostoyevskian conclusion from this death foretold: if God does not exist or exists no longer, then all things are permitted. But if there is no heaven or hell, it is the nonbeliever who realizes that if we are to save ourselves here on earth then we must establish good will, understanding, and moral law. In 2006, Eugenio Lecaldano published his book Un’etica senza Dio, an ethics without God, which draws on a wealth of anthological documentation to argue that only by putting God to one side can we truly lead a moral life. I certainly do not want to establish here whether Lecaldano and the other authors he cites are right. I merely wish to point out that there are some who hold that the absence of God does not eliminate the ethical problem—and this was quite clear to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini when he founded a “nonbelievers teaching chair” in Milan. The fact that Martini did not go on to become Pope may cast doubt on the divine inspiration of the conclave, but I am not competent to judge such matters. I just remember that Elie Wiesel used to say that those who believe that all things are permitted are not those who believe that God is dead, but those who think they are God (a shortcoming of all dictators great and small).
The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations is by no means shared by all contemporary thinkers, most of whom put the following objections to Nietzsche and his followers: First, if there were no facts but only interpretations, then what would an interpretation be an interpretation of? And second, even if interpretations interpreted one another, there still ought to be some initial object or event that triggered our interpretation. Third, even if the entity were indefinable, we would have to specify who is talking about it metaphorically, and the problem of saying something true would shift from the object to the subject of knowledge. God might be dead, but not Nietzsche. On what basis do we justify Nietzsche’s presence? By saying he is merely a metaphor? But if he is, who is saying so? And not just that. Even though we often use metaphors to describe reality, in order to formulate them we would need words with a literal meaning that denote things we know through experience: I cannot call the thing that holds up the table a “leg” if I do not have a non-metaphorical notion of the human leg, knowing its form and function. And finally, fourth, in asserting that there is no longer an intersubjective criterion for verification, we forget that every so often certain things outside of us (which Nietzsche called the terrible powers) oppose our attempts to express that criterion even metaphorically; in other words, if you treat an inflammation with, say, phlogiston theory you cannot heal it, whereas by administering antibiotics you can. And therefore one medical theory is better than another.
So perhaps there is no absolute, or if it does exist it will be neither conceivable nor attainable, but there are natural forces that back up or challenge our interpretations. If I interpret a trompe l’oeil painting of an open door as a real door and march straight on to go through it, the fact that is the impenetrable wall will considerably weaken my interpretation.
There must be a way in which things are or go—and the proof of this is not just that all men are mortal but also that, if I try to walk through a wall, I am going to break my nose. Death and that wall are the only forms of the absolute that we cannot doubt.
The evidence of that wall, which tells us “no” when we wish to interpret it as if it was not there, is arguably a very modest criterion of truth for the guardians of the absolute, but as Keats put it, “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Perhaps there is more to say on the absolute, but for the time being nothing comes to mind.
[La Milanesiana, 2007]