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Text File | 2010-12-12 | 10KB | 250 lines

Passage from Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco



"I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and
nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right
away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic."

"Don't I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the
Templars. How do you identify the others?"

"I'll explain. By the way, what's your name?"

"Casaubon."

"Casaubon. Wasn't he a character in Middlemarch?"

"I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name,
but we're not related."

"The next round's on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are
four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and
lunatics."

"And that covers everybody?"

"Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look,
everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a
cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a
reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."

"Idealtypen."

"Very good. You know German?"

"Enough for bibliographies."

"When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just
spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with
Chinese."

"My German's poor, so I'll graduate. But let's get back to your
typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?"

"A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the
others." He took a sip of his drink. "Hi there, beautiful," he said.
"Made that suicide attempt yet?"

"No," the girl answered as she walked by. "I'm in a collective now."

"Good for you," Belbo said. He turned back to me. "Of course, there's no
reason one can't have collective suicides, too."

"Getting back to the lunatics."

"Look, don't take me too literally. I'm not trying to put the universe
in order. I 'm just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a
publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition."

"All right. My round."

"All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too
fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don't even talk; they sort of slobber
and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against
his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way."

"That's not possible."

"It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come
to publishers' offices. So let's forget about them."

"Let's."

"Being a fool is more complicated. It's a form of social behavior. A
fool is one who always talks outside his glass."

"What do you mean?"

"Like this." He pointed at the counter near his glass. "He wants to talk
about what's in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He's the guy
who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how's your lovely
wife to someone whose wife has just left him."

"Yes, I know a few of those."

"Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They
embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their
positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when
someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don't
interest us, either. They're never creative, their talent is all
second-hand, so they don't submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don't
claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is
talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when
they really offend, they're magnificent. It's a dying breed, the
embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a
Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read
such things?"

"I do."

"Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one
from Martinique covered with medals. 'Vous etes negre?' Murat asks.
'Oui, mon general!' the man answers. And Murat says: 'Bravo, bravo,
continuez!' And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I'm
celebrating a historic decision in my life. I've stopped drinking.
Another round? Don't answer, you'll make me feel guilty. Pilade!"

"What about the morons?"

"Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong.
Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats
are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are
mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens
of Piraeus are Athenians."

"Which they are."

"Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something
that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason."

"You mean it's okay to say something that's wrong as long as the reason
is right."

"Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?"

"All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower
life forms, therefore man is a great ape."

"Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something's wrong, but it
takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the
fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons
almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of
paralogism. For an editor, it's bad news. It can take him an eternity to
identify a moron. Plenty of morons' books are published, because they're
convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the
morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn't do it, why should he?"

"Philosophers don't either. Saint Anselm's ontological argument is
moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a
being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses
existence in thought with existence in reality."

"True, but Gaunilon's refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an
island in the sea even if the island doesn't exist. He confuses thinking
of the possible with thinking of the necessary."

"A duel between morons."

"Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable
only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime
purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed
Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism."

"We're surrounded by morons."

"Everyone's a moron--save me and thee. Or, rather--I wouldn't want to
offend--save thee."

"Somehow I feel that Godel's theorem has something to do with all this."

"I wouldn't know, I'm a cretin. Pilade!"

"My round."

"We'll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It
must be true, because he's a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen
well."

"That's moronic thinking."

"Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call
Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren't, but Cretans don't
trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar."

"Isn't that moronic thinking?"

"You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win
the Nobel prize."

"Hold on. Of those who don't believe God created the world in seven
days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God
created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don't
believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists.
How's that?"

"My God--to use the mot juste--I wouldn't know. A moron-ism or not?"

"It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of
syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars."

"And what if you were a moron?"

"I'd be in excellent, venerable company."

"You're right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our
moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to
define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great
thinker is someone else's moron."

"Thought as the coherent expression of moronism."

"But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another."

"Profound. It's two o'clock, Pilade's about to close, and we still
haven't got to the lunatics."

"I'm getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who
doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic,
however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't
concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him,
everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and
whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can ell him by the
liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and
by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."

"Invariably?"

"There are lunatics who don't bring up the Templars, but those who do
are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a
sudden..."He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind
and asked for the check. "Speaking of the Templars, the other day some
character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a
human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see
it?"

"I'd be glad to. Maybe there's something I can use."

"I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour.
Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me
than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit."

"What makes you trust me?"

"Who says I trust you? But if you come, I'll trust you. I trust
curiosity."

A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. "Comrades! There are
fascists along the canal with chains!"

"Let's get them," said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had
threatened me over Krupskaya. "Come on, comrades!" And they all left.

"What do you want to do?" I asked, feeling guilty. "Should we go along?"

"No," Belbo said. "Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out.
For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the
cold-turkey effect. Everything I've said to you so far is false. Good
night, Casaubon."