From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, Page 3

  It has been said that primitives are elements of a whole that, by virtue of the systematic relationship between its terms, cannot be anything but finite: but this would be a simplified Porphyrian tree or a tree of genera and species good only for the purposes of classification.

  It is hard to define primitiveness by distinguishing between analytical and synthetic properties, a distinction severely criticized by Quine (1953a), in part because the notion of analyticalness is completely circular (if a property contained in the definition of a term is analytic it cannot be a criterion for establishing the appropriateness of a dictionary definition).

  The possibility of positing a difference between necessary and contingent properties must also be excluded, because if it were necessary for a cat to be mammiferous and contingent for it to meow, then all “necessary” would mean is “analytic.”

  It has been proposed that finiteness is a requirement for a packet of primitives (primitives ought to be limited in number, considering that it would be anti-economical to have as many primitives as there are lemmata to define), but it is precisely the cataloguing of this finite number of semantic atoms that has turned out so far to be problematic.

  It has been suggested that primitives are simple concepts, but it is difficult to define a simple concept (the concept of mouse seems more simple and immediate than that of mammifer, and it is easier to define concepts like emphyteusis than verbs like to do).

  It has been suggested that they depend on our experience of the world, or that there are (as Russell 1905 suggested) “object-words” whose meaning we learn directly by ostension, and “dictionary-words” that can be defined by other dictionary-words—but Russell was the first to recognize that pentagram is a dictionary-word for most speakers, but would be an object-word for a child who grew up in a room in which the wallpaper was decorated with pentagrams.

  The requirement of adequacy has been proposed (primitives should serve to define all words), but, if we consider as primitives sufficient to define the concept of “bachelor” features like HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED, why does it seem inadequate to call a Benedictine monk a bachelor? We would have to add other constrictions (for example, a bachelor is an adult human unmarried male who has not taken a vow of chastity), and with that we have introduced encyclopedic elements into our dictionary.

  The requirements of independence (primitives should not depend for their definition on other primitives) and absence of further interpretability have been proposed, but not even HUMAN seems without further interpretability if we consider the whole debate over abortion and cloning that is taking place today precisely on the subject of what it means to be human. In reality, in any lexicon any term is potentially interpretable by means of other terms in the same lexicon, or other semantic devices, according to the criteria of interpretance and unlimited semiosis established by Peirce.

  Lastly, if primitives are rooted in our way of thinking, the principle of universality suggests itself. It is assuredly possible that certain experiences related to our bodies are universal, such as above/below, eat/sleep, be born/die, but in the first instance it is unthinkable that we can define all the objects and events in the universe in terms of these ideas, and, secondly, universal does not mean primitive, given that a universally understood concept such as dying needs to be further defined, as is demonstrated by the debates on end-of-life decisions and the harvesting of organs.

  In the face of these criticisms, since the middle of the twentieth century, the conviction has made more and more headway, especially among the theorists of cognitivist semantics, that linguistic competence is always encyclopedic, and that in semantic representation no distinction can be made (except on a provisional basis and for the purpose of specific analyses) between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world.

  But at this point we must abandon the vicissitudes of the dictionary to trace the historical evolution of the encyclopedia.

  1.3. The Encyclopedias

  The role of the encyclopedia has fluctuated over the centuries.13 The word “encyclopedia” comes from enkyklios paideia, which signified a complete education in the Greek tradition.14 The term “encyclopedia,” however, makes its first appearance in the sixteenth century, first in a different form in Fleming Joachim Stergk’s Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kuklopaideia (1529), and then in The Boke Named The Governor (1531) by Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in chapter XIII, on some reasons for the decline of education among English gentlemen, cites the encyclopedia as the sum total of knowledge, or the “world of science,” or “the circle of doctrine.” This same sum total of knowledge as a complete education is recommended by Gargantua to his son in book II, chapter 8 of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532):

  That is why, my son, I urge you to employ your youth in making good progress in study [and virtue]. You are in Paris; Epistemon your tutor is with you; both can teach you: one directly and orally, the other by laudable examples.

  I intend and will that you acquire a perfect command of languages—first Greek (as Quintilian wishes), secondly Latin, and then Hebrew for the Holy Scriptures, as well as Chaldaean and Arabic likewise—and that, for your Greek, you mould your style by imitating Plato, and for your Latin, Cicero.

  Let there be no history which you do not hold ready in memory: to help you, you have the cosmographies of those who have written on the subject.

  When you were still very young—about five or six—I gave you a foretaste of geometry, arithmetic and music among the liberal arts. Follow that up with the other arts. Know all the canons of astronomy, but leave judicial astrology and the Art of Lullius alone as abuses and vanities.

  I want you to learn all of the beautiful texts of Civil Law by heart and compare them to moral philosophy.

  And as for the knowledge of natural phenomena, I want you to apply yourself to it with curiosity: let there be no sea, river or stream the fishes of which you do not know. Know all the birds of the air, all the trees, bushes and shrubs of the forests, all the herbs in the soil, all the metals hidden deep in the womb of the Earth, the precious stones of all the Orient and the South: let none remain unknown to you.

  Then frequent the books of the ancient medical writers, Greek, Arabic and Latin, without despising the Talmudists or the Cabbalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of that other world which is Man.

  And for a few hours every day start to study the Sacred Writings: first the Gospels and Epistles of the Apostles in Greek, then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me see you an abyss of erudition.15

  In book II, chapter 20, Thaumastes praises the young Pantagruel’s culture, saying: “I swear he discovered, for my benefit, the true source, well and abyss of the encyclopedia of learning.”

  In 1536 we find the term in Juan Luis Vives’s De disciplinis, in which he calls “encyclopedia” the various things that the educand must know, with explicit reference to Pliny and other classical encyclopedists.16 As part of the title of a book the word appears in Paulus Scalichius de Lika’s Encyclopediae seu orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam profanarum epistemon (Basel, 1559).

  1.3.1. Pliny and the Model of the Ancient Encyclopedia

  No Greek encyclopedias, at least in the sense of compilations of previous knowledge, have survived. Of course, the works of Aristotle are an encyclopedia, ranging as they do from logic to astronomy and from the study of animals to human psychology. They are not presented, however, as a collection of shared knowledge, but as a fresh offering. Likewise, in a Latin context, rather than an encyclopedic collection of facts, Lucretius’s De rerum natura aspires to be a systematic exposition of “scientific” truths.

  The works that have been seen as examples of Greek encyclopedism are instead expressions, frequently incidental, of curiosity and wonder over fabulous lands and peoples: in this sense an encyclopedic component has been identified in the Odyssey. Encyclopedic interests are definitely present in Herodotus when he describes the marvels of Egypt and of other
barbaric peoples. The Greek Alexander Romance, though its actual date is uncertain and its attribution to Callisthenes, a contemporary of Alexander, apocryphal, was probably composed at the beginning of the Hellenistic period and, while claiming to narrate the adventures of the famous Macedonian condottiere, presents itself in fact as a travel guide to marvelous places teeming with extraordinary creatures.

  It was the mature Alexandrian period that produced many works of paradoxography, devoted to the presentation of remarkable things and events, such as the treatise devoted by Strato of Lampsacus to unusual animals, the Mirabilia of Callimachus, or that of Antigonus of Carystus, while the De mirabilibus auscultationibus, an assemblage or miscellany of little-known facts in the fields of botany, mineralogy, zoology, hydrography, and mythology, once attributed to Aristotle, can be assigned to Hellenistic circles of the third century B.C. Finally, we may speak of specialized encyclopedias in the case of later geographical compendia such as Pomponius Mela’s De situ orbis (first century A.D.), Aelian’s De natura animalium (second / third century) or the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (second / third century).

  But there is a line between the compendia of curious facts and erudite digressions (like the Noctes Atticae, composed by Aulus Gellius in the second century A.D., or specialized encyclopedias such as Pomponius Mela’s) and an encyclopedia in the global and organic sense of the word, a work that aspires in other words to be an exhaustive catalogue of existing knowledge.

  The Hellenistic world assigned the role that Roman and medieval scholars would eventually assign to the encyclopedia, not to a single volume that deals with everything, but to a collection of all existing volumes, the library, as well as to a collection of all things possible, the museum. The museum and library built in Alexandria by Ptolemy I (said to have held, depending on the period, between 500,000 and 700,000 volumes) formed the nucleus of a veritable university, a center for the collection, research, and transmission of knowledge.

  The encyclopedic attitude took shape instead in Roman circles, in which the whole of Greek knowledge was gathered together, in a labor of appropriation of the patrimony of that Graecia capta which ferum victorem cepit.17 An early example is the Rerum divinarum et humanarum antiquitates of Terentius Varro (first century B.C.), of which only fragments have survived, which dealt with history, grammar, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, agriculture, law, rhetoric, the arts, literature, the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, the history of the gods. We do possess, however, the 37 books of Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (first century A.D., approximately 20,000 facts cited and 500 authors consulted), devoted to the heavens and the universe in general, the various countries of the world, prodigious births and burials, the earth’s fauna, creatures of the deep, birds, insects, vegetables, medicines derived from vegetable and animal sources, metals, painting, precious stones and gems.

  At first sight, Pliny’s work appears to be a mere confused jumble of facts, with no structure, but, if we turn our attention to the immense index, we realize that the work begins in fact with the heavens, going on to deal with geography, demography, and ethnography, followed by anthropology and human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, gardening, natural pharmacology, medicine, and magic, before proceeding to mineralogy, architecture, and the plastic arts—setting up a sort of hierarchy proceeding from the original to the derivative, from the natural to the artificial—according to the arborescent structure illustrated in Figure 1.11.

  Figure 1.11

  This aspect should also be borne in mind for what we will have to say about subsequent encyclopedias. An encyclopedia always relies for its organization on a tree—whose model is invariably, on a more or less conscious level, that of the binary subdivision of a Porphyrian tree. But the difference between the Arbor Porphyriana and the encyclopedic tree (which amounts, openly or in a dissimulated fashion, to a table of contents) is that the Porphyrian tree claims to use the terms of its disjunctions as primitives, not susceptible of further definition, and at the same time indispensable for defining something else, while in the encyclopedic index each node is referred to the notions that define it and will be presented in the course of the overall discussion. And in this sense classifications like those of the natural sciences also have or can assume the role of an index.

  This difference is fundamental to an understanding of the history of encyclopedias and their indices. For a long time the encyclopedist used his index as a working tool that was basically not supposed to be of interest to the reader, whose need instead was for the information the encyclopedia contained—in other words, the encyclopedist was concerned with where he was going to put the crocodile, but he believed in principle that what the reader was interested in were the crocodile’s empirical properties, not its place in the classification. Instead, this point of view gradually changed in the case of many modern encyclopedias, whose primary aim was precisely to provide a model of the organization of knowledge. It was some time, however, before the “plan” of an encyclopedia began to constitute an object of reflection or of meta-encyclopedic comment. For the reader, the encyclopedia appeared as a “map” of different territories whose edges were jagged and often imprecise, so that one had the impression of moving through it as if it were a labyrinth that allowed one to choose paths that were constantly new, without feeling obliged to stick to a route leading from the general to the particular.

  The second aspect of how Pliny lays out a model for encyclopedias to come is that he does not speak of things he knows from experience but of things handed down to him by tradition, and he does not make the slightest effort to separate reliable empirical information from legend (he gives equal space to the crocodile and the basilisk). This point is extremely important in defining the encyclopedia as a theoretical model: the encyclopedia does not claim to register what really exists but what people traditionally believe exists—and hence everything that an educated person should know, not simply to have knowledge of the world, but also to understand discourses about the world.

  This characteristic is already evident in the Hellenistic encyclopedias (a great many paragraphs in the pseudo-Aristotelian De mirabilibus, for example, employ a verbum dicendi such as “they say that” or “the story goes that” or “it is said that”), and it will remain a constant in medieval encyclopedias, as well as in those of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Foucault reminds us that Buffon was astonished that in a sixteenth-century naturalist like Aldrovandi there was “an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, quotations from other authors, fables relayed uncritically, observations which dealt indiscriminately with the anatomy, habitat, and mythological properties of an animal, and the uses that could be made of it in medicine or in magic.” In fact, as Foucault goes on to comment:

  When one goes back to take a look at the Historia serpentum et draconum, one finds the chapter “On the serpent in general” arranged under the following headings: equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds caused by the serpent, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, epithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries, hieroglyphics, emblems and symbols, proverbs, coinage, miracles, riddles, devices, heraldic signs, historical facts, dreams, simulacra and statues, use in human diet, use in medicine, miscellaneous uses. Whereupon Buffon comments: “Let it be judged after that what proportion of natural history is to be found in such a hotch-potch of writing. There is no description here, only legend.” And indeed, for Aldrovandi and his contemporaries, it was all legenda—things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts a
nd characters, of discourse and forms. When one is faced with the task of writing an animal’s history, it is useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of compiler: one has to collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets. (Foucault 1970: 38–39)

  Foucault sees this tendency as typical of the sixteenth-century episteme, whereas, as we have seen and as we will see, it is a characteristic of every idea of encyclopedia, from Pliny to the present day. In fact what distinguishes a contemporary encyclopedia like the Britannica, the French Larousse or the Italian Treccani from Pliny’s encyclopedias or the medieval encyclopedias or Aldrovandi’s encyclopedia and so on, is simply the critical attention devoted to separating legendary ideas from those that are scientifically proven (but only because today this difference too, ontological in nature, is considered part of what every educated person should know). Aside from this difference—which acquires relevance, let’s say, between Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Diderot and D’Alembert’s mid-eighteenth-century Encyclopédie—a contemporary encyclopedia is also expected in principle to tell us everything that has been said, whether it be about sulfuric acid or Apollo or the sorcerer Merlin.

  1.3.2. Medieval Encyclopedias

  Compared with Pliny, medieval encyclopedias have a different origin and serve different purposes. If we are to understand their nature, we must begin with Augustine, whose concern was with the problem of the correct interpretation of Scripture and took into consideration, not only the signs produced by human beings in an effort to convey meaning, and the natural phenomena that may be interpreted as signs (De doctrina christiana II, 1, 1), but also, since Scripture speaks not only in verbis but also in factis (De trinitate XV, 9, 15), events and things of sacred history that have been supernaturally arranged so as to be read as signs.18 Augustine taught how to resolve the question of whether a sign was to be understood in a literal or a figurative sense, and he said that we must suspect a figurative sense whenever Scripture appears to go against the truths of faith and moral behavior or gets lost in superfluitates or brings into play expressions not especially meaningful from the literal point of view (proper names, numbers and technical terms, elaborate descriptions of flowers, natural prodigies, precious stones, vestments and ceremonies, objects and events irrelevant from the spiritual point of view).