Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator, best known…
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator, best known for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. ◦ He wrote his university thesis on the aesthetics of medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, earning his Laurea degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954. ◦ At the time of his death he was an Emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life. ◦ Eco's Milan apartment contained thirty thousand volumes, with another twenty thousand at his manor. ◦ He published his first novel in 1980 at the age of forty-eight. ◦ As an adolescent he wrote comic books and fantasy novels, and described himself as a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces. ◦ Like every Italian schoolchild at that time, he was enrolled in the Fascist youth movement, obliged to wear military-style uniforms and attend rallies on Saturday. ◦
Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, and are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields, while the closed text limits understanding to a single unequivocal line and remains the least rewarding. ◦ His notable ideas include the open work (opera aperta), the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris), and the limits of interpretation. ◦ He followed Charles Sanders Peirce in holding that through signs we interpret facts, and argued that if there were no facts and only interpretations, there would be nothing left to interpret. ◦ Eco viewed the comic as a critical way of undercutting fanaticism and a diabolical shade of suspicion behind every proclamation of truth. ◦ He maintained that the list is the origin of culture and part of the history of art and literature, proposing that culture seeks to make infinity comprehensible and that humans face infinity through lists, catalogs, collections, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. ◦ He suggested that people like lists because they do not want to die. ◦ Eco defined culture not as knowing facts such as when Napoleon died, but as knowing how one can find out in two minutes. ◦ In his analysis of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism, he identified features including the cult of tradition, the impossibility of advancement of learning, irrationalism, the cult of action for action's sake, and the equation of disagreement with treason. ◦ He held that Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises and that our duty is to uncover it and point our finger at any of its new instances every day, in every part of the world. ◦
Eco described his novelistic process as constructing a world and then setting constraints for it, such as how many steps in a spiral staircase or items on a laundry list, around which the words would coil. ◦ He reported that The Name of the Rose took two years to write because he already had hundreds of files on the Middle Ages, while Foucault's Pendulum took eight years to research and write, during which he lived in his own world for nearly a decade. ◦ He stated that he never thinks of semiotics when writing his novels, leaving that work to others afterward. ◦ When unable to construct a theory, he narrated a story. ◦
Eco's mental models center on the open work (opera aperta), the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris), and the limits of interpretation. ◦ He adopted Peirce's view that through signs we interpret facts, guarding against the idea that there are only interpretations and no facts. ◦ He proposed that a secret is powerful when it is empty, using the Masonic secret as an example that can be filled with every possible notion as long as it remains undefined. ◦ He conceptualized Ur-Fascism as a set of features that cannot be organized into a system and many of which contradict each other, yet one is enough to allow fascism to coagulate around it. ◦
Eco was a semiotician, or student of signs and symbols. ◦ His principal early work in aesthetics, Opera aperta (1962; The Open Work), examined modern music, Symbolist verse, and literature of controlled disorder, arguing that the messages are fundamentally ambiguous and invite the audience to participate actively in the interpretive and creative process. ◦ He explored communication and semiotics in A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984). ◦ In 1965 he coined the term "semiological guerrilla" in his lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," influencing guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture. ◦
Eco described the detective novel as asking the central question of philosophy: who dunnit? ◦ As an adolescent he wrote comic books in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, and illustrations to make them look printed. ◦ In spoken remarks in 2015, he characterized social media as giving the right to speak to legions of imbeciles who previously only spoke at the bar after a glass of wine, and called it the invasion of imbeciles. ◦
Eco was enrolled as a child in the Fascist youth movement, yet after the first collapse of Fascism in 1943 he discovered the existence of different political parties and views in democratic newspapers, later becoming a chronicler of Ur-Fascism's enduring dangers. ◦ ◦ He was a rigorous scholar of semiotics who claimed he never thought of semiotics when writing his novels. ◦ He developed a passion for the Middle Ages with an almost arbitrary intensity, comparing it to the way some people develop a passion for coconuts. ◦ He described himself as an adolescent perfectionist who produced unaccomplished masterpieces. ◦
Eco invites readers to share the task of interpretation, to respect the polyphony of signs, to slow down before deciding upon meaning, and to doubt anything that promises an end to the pursuit of meaning. ◦ He suggested that if one constantly changes interests, one's library will constantly be saying something different about oneself. ◦ For those constructing worlds, he advised researching to set all constraints, letting the words coil around them. ◦