Rodrigues 1 Eduardo Rodrigues Professor Optimism One ENGL 101 10 February 2010

In his book Kant and the Platypus, Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics, author of innumerous essays as well as best-selling novels writes about the assumptions we make in life in the face of events. Eco says that Not at all a comforting decision, given that once we have reckoned with being, we find ourselves having to reckon with the subject that emits this flatus vocis. And that is not all. While it is a principle of hermeneutics that there are no facts only interpretations, this does not prevent us from asking if there might not perchance be bad interpretations. Because to say that there are no facts only interpretations, certainly means saying that what appears to us as fact is the effect of interpretation but not that every possible interpretation produces something that, in the light of subsequent interpretations, we are obliged to consider as if it were a fact. In other words, the fact that every winning poker hand is constructed by a choice on the part of the player does not mean that every hand the player lays down is a winning one...(Eco 48) The quote There are no facts, only interpretations inserted in this text created by the renowned author of the novel The Name of the Rose properly relates to the primary signification given by its creator, Nietzsche. In this text, Umberto Eco profusely explores the broadest signification of the quote. But, he neither correctly entails the quote to its author, nor emphasizes the quote inserted in the text, using it as a normal current expression of his ideas. In my opinion Umberto Eco should have quoted Nietzsche in his text, by inserting his

famous quote There are no facts, only interpretations and properly - in a more accurate way included information about his 1880 notebooks The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values in which Nietzsche refers to the quote adopting a metaphysical orientation towards the doctrines of Eternal Recurrence and the Will to Power, speculating upon their intellectual strength as interpretations of reality itself.

Rodrigues 3

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. Kant and the Platypus. English Trans. by Alastair McEwen. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1999. 48. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Will to Power. English Trans. By Walter Kaufmann, and R.J. Hollingdale. Random House, 1967. Print.