59	IF STALIN HAD BEEN A NIHILIST

I was already approaching these themes after having written La società trasparente, to the point that when a second edition was under consideration, I added a chapter on “the limits of derealization.”

The idea is: let’s move toward a society in which image and reality are indistinguishable—the image given me by interpretation, that is.

At the same time technology—and about this Adorno, the philosopher I was thinking of working on after I graduated, and whom Pareyson, God bless him, steered me away from, might be right—is headed toward such possibilities of control that it is unlikely that people won’t use it for that.

So what to do? I’m convinced that not much can be done about the uniformization of the world, in the current situation at any rate, under a sole empire, the United States. But tomorrow it might be someone else. If there’s a way out—with the end of every absurd claim to absolute objectivity—it’s for society to become the place where truth signifies accord among interpreters, not the claim to demonstrate how matters stand. But accord among interpreters affronts too many existing structures: the Church, capital, all the fundamentalisms.

I am not all that confident that the future of the world will necessarily lie in the direction of the weakening of the real, as I believe it should. In this I’ve regained sympathy for Hegel, but as Benedetto Croce thought him, or Gadamer, who were fairly alike in this: a Hegel without the absolute spirit, without the end of history. Because this spirit that reconciles perfectly with itself, as Hegel thought it, ends up being a ball and chain, indeed it transmutes once again into the contrary of emancipation. Like those revolutions that ought to be over once they have taken place, but that lead to Stalin instead.

The idea of history as claim to continuity, rather than as flashes that generate a new beginning but then don’t stabilize themselves as such, leads directly to Stalinism. In opposition to that stands the idea that historical progress signifies leaping further ahead into the world of symbols, of formalization, of laws, of explicitation, of discourse. When I transform something into discourse, into symbols, into words, I do indeed relieve reality of its oppressing and oppressive weight, but I don’t move toward the completion of history.

Gadamer in the end is a watered-down Hegelian, like me.

This is the only emancipation I know, with nihilism to dissolve the absolutistic elements.

There’s always the temptation to fall back into the myth of the real, what Heidegger would call “the fall back into metaphysics.”

“Be realistic,” they say. Well, “Be realistic” means: adapt yourself to the situation as it is, accept things as they are.

Sure, I want to know what the situation is too. But I don’t mistake that for the norm. Realism is pure conservatism: the datum is taken as the objectivity that science must recognize and morality must respect. That’s why Rorty is so important for me, because he’s a pragmatist, someone according to whom what is true is what suits us, what’s good for us.

Indignant remonstration: so it’s only what’s good for you? Answer: not in the least, it’s what’s good for us, for a group, for a society, tendentially for all of humanity. But not because the pope preached it, not because we’ve discovered it, but because we’ve come to agreement.

“The truth will make you free” signifies that that which makes us free is true.

Be realistic, demand the impossible. As they used to shout in the streets a million years ago, in 1968.