FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH HISTORICAL STUDIES ON THE SIGN AND INTERPRETATION UMBERTO ECO Translated by Anthony Oldcorn Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Originally published as Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione, by Umberto Eco, copyright © 2007 RCS Libri S.p.A. Chapters 11 and 12, “Th e Language of the Austral Land” and “Th e Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre,” were originally published in Serendipities, by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver. Copyright © 1998 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Eco, Umberto. [Dall’albero al labirinto. En glish] From the tree to the labyrinth : historical studies on the sign and interpretation / Umberto Eco ; translated by Anthony Oldcorn. pages cm “Originally published as Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione, by Umberto Eco, © 2007 RCS Libri S.p.A.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 04918- 5 (alk. paper) 1. Semiotics— History. 2. Language and languages— Philosophy—History. I. Oldcorn, Anthony, translator. II. Title. P99.E2613 2014 121'.68—dc23 2013015258 Contents Introduction 1 1 From the Tree to the Labyrinth 3 2 Meta phor as Knowledge: Aristotle’s Medieval (Mis)Fortunes 95 3 From Meta phor to Analogia Entis 116 4 Th e Dog Th at Barked (and Other Zoosemiotic Archaeologies) 171 5 Fakes and Forgeries in the Middle Ages 223 6 Jottings on Beatus of Liébana 250 7 Dante between Modistae and Kabbalah 286 8 Th e Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts 309 9 Toward a History of Denotation 353 10 On Llull, Pico, and Llullism 385 11 Th e Language of the Austral Land 424 12 Th e Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre 440 13 On the Silence of Kant 457 vi Contents 14 Natural Semiosis and the Word in Alessandro Manzoni’s Th e Betrothed (I promessi sposi) 488 15 Th e Th reshold and the Infi nite: Peirce and Primary Iconism 508 16 Th e Defi nitions in Croce’s Aesthetic 531 17 Five Senses of the Word “Semantics,” from Bréal to the Present Day 548 18 Weak Th ought versus the Limits of Interpretation 564 References 587 Index 613 Introduction At the second congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (Vienna, July 1979) I presented a number of “Proposals for a History of Se- miotics.” I recommended that we intensify historical studies on the various theories of the sign and of semiosis over the centuries, fi rst of all because I considered it a necessary contribution to the history of philosophy as a whole, and secondly because I was convinced that to do semiotics today one needed to know how it was done yesterday, however much it might have been dis- guised as something else. And what better place to begin than from that “Coup d’oeil sur le développement de la sémiotique” with which Roman Jako- bson had opened the fi rst international congress of the association fi ve years earlier? I suggested three lines of research. Th e fi rst had narrower ambitions, since it was confi ned to those authors who had spoken explicitly about the relation of signifi cation, starting with the Cratylus and with Aristotle, down through Augustine and eventually to Peirce— but without neglecting the authors of treatises on rhetoric like Emanuele Tesauro or the theorists of universal and artifi cial languages like Wilkins or Beck. My second line of research involved a close rereading of the whole history of philosophy with a view to fi nding implicit semiotic theories even where they had apparently not been explicitly developed, and the chief example I gave was that of Kant. Finally, my third suggestion was intended to cover all those forms of lit- erature in which symbolic and hermeneutical strategies of any kind were deployed or developed (among them, for instance, the works of the Pseudo- Areopagite). I cited as examples manuals of divination (texts like Guglielmo 2 FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH Dorando’s Rationale divinorum offi ciorum), the medieval bestiaries, the vari- ous discussions of poetics, down to the marginal notes of writers and artists who had refl ected in one way or another on the pro cesses of communication. Anyone familiar with the bibliography of semiotics over the last thirty years knows that my appeal was anchored on the one hand in already devel- oped or developing historiographical interests, while on the other it voiced an urgency that was already, so to speak, in the air: over the past thirty years, the contributions to an historical reconstruction of theories of the sign and semiosis have been many, so many that we are already in a position (pro- vided someone could be found with the will and the energy to take on the task) to plan a defi nitive history of semiotic thought, by various authors and in several volumes. For my own part, in the course of this thirty- year period, I have contin- ued to elaborate the occasional personal off ering, even returning from time to time to a topic previously explored— not to mention that chapter in semi- otic history to which I devoted my La ricerca della lingua perfetta (1993), translated as Th e Search for a Perfect Language (1995). Such, then, is the ori- gin and nature of the essays gathered in the present volume. Th ey were conceived under various circumstances, some for strictly aca- demic occasions, others as discourses addressed to a broader general public. I decided not to attempt to rewrite them in a more uniform style, and I have kept the apparatus of notes and references in the case of the more specialized contri- butions and the conversational tone in the case of the more essayistic pieces. I trust that even readers whose interests are not specifi cally semiotic (in the professional sense of the word) will be able to read these writings as con- tributions to a history of the various philosophies of language or languages. 1 From the Tree to the Labyrinth 1.1. Dictionary and Encyclopedia For some time now the notions of dictionary and encyclopedia have been used in semiotics, linguistics, the philosophy of language and the cognitive sciences, to say nothing of computer science, to identify two models of seman- tic repre sen ta tion, models that in turn refer back to a general repre sen ta tion of knowledge and/or the world. In defi ning a term (and its corresponding concept), the dictionary model is expected to take into account only those properties necessary and suffi cient to distinguish that par tic u lar concept from others; in other words, it ought to contain only those properties defi ned by Kant as analytical (analytical being that a priori judgment in which the concept functioning as predicate can be deduced from the defi nition of the subject). Th us the analytical prop- erties of dog would be ANIMAL, MAMMAL, and CANINE (on the basis of which a dog is distinguishable from a cat, and it is logically incorrect and semantically inaccurate to say of something that it is a dog but it is not an ani- mal). Th is defi nition does not assign to the dog the properties of barking or being domesticated: these are not necessary properties (because there may be dogs incapable of barking and/or hostile to man) and are not part of our knowledge of a language but of our knowledge of the world. Th ey are there- fore matter for the encyclopedia. In this sense semiotic dictionaries and encyclopedias are not directly comparable to dictionaries and encyclopedias “in the fl esh,” so to speak, to the published products, in other words, that go by the same name. In fact, dic- tionaries “in the fl esh” are not usually composed according to the dictionary 4 FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH model: a normal dictionary, for instance, may defi ne “cat” as a feline mam- mal, but usually adds details of an encyclopedic nature that concern the cat’s fur, the shape of its eyes, its behavioral habits, and so on and so forth. If we wish to identify a dictionary in its pure form—to which various con- temporary theoreticians in the fi eld of artifi cial intelligence still refer when they speak (see section 1.7 below) of “ontologies”— we must return to the model of the Arbor Porphyriana or Porphyrian tree, in other words to the commentary on Aristotle’s Categories written in the third century a.d. by the Neo- Platonist Porphyry in his Isagoge, a text that throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond) will be a constant point of reference for any theory of defi nition. 1.2. Th e Dictionary 1.2.1. Th e First Idea of the Dictionary: Th e Arbor Porphyriana Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, II, iii, 90b 30) says that what is defi ned is the essence or essential nature. Defi ning a substance means deciding, among its attributes, which of them appear to be essential, and in par tic u lar those that are the cause of the fact that the substance is what it is, in other words, its sub- stantial form. Th e problem is coming up with the right attributes that can be predicated as elements of the defi nition (Posterior Analytics, II, xiii, 96a– b). Aristotle gives the example of the number 3: an attribute such as being certainly ap- plies to the number 3, but also to anything else that is not a number.