MNEMOSYNE a Journal of Classical Studies

MNEMOSYNE A Journal of Classical Studies SERIES IV VOL. LI FASC. 5 OCTOBER 1998 BRILL THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS: READING MARTIANUS CAPELLA’S THE MARRIAGE OF PHILOLOGY AND MERCURY*) BY HAIN-LIANG CHANG Current interest in mediaeval trivium and the revival of rhetoric have led researchers to re-examine the implications of the liberal arts, as outlined by Martianus Capella (fl. 410-39) and Boethius (ca. 480-524), in relation to contemporary thinking of signs. In his proposals for a history of semiotics1), Umberto Eco identifies three categories of writers who can be said to have contributed to such a his tory. His checklist runs the gamut from explicit theories of signs, such as those of Augustine and Boethius, through repressed theories abstractable from the writings of the Church Fathers who discuss language in general, and finally to the so-called encyclopedic semiotic practices, such as early Christian symbology. Meanwhile, the revival of rhetoric, especially by American neo- pragmatists over the last two decades, has evoked once again a time- honoured debate between rhetoric and logic in the West, which can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. One is reminded, among other things, of the distinction between two crit ical models of demonstration and persuasion which Stanley Fish makes in the tradition of the Sophists2). The debate has been otherwise interpreted as that between the two traditionally hostile disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric. This opposition gets a linguistic turn in Paul de Man’s celebrated essay Semiology and Rhetoric where the author casts new light on the issue by situating it in the mediaeval liberal arts education system and *) The author wishes to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for supporting his research project on the history of semiotics and The University o£ Manchester’s Department of English and American Studies for an Honorary Research Fellowship in 1997, during which time the paper was written and presented in the Postgraduate Seminar on 22 April 1997. He gratefully acknowledges the learned comments of the journal’s readers regarding the Latin quotations and a reference to the ideas of Ilsebraut Hadot in her Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris 1984), where she argues that the system of the seven arts has its roots in Neoplatonism, as it appears in Augustinus de Ordine. 1)Umberto Eco, Proposals for a History of Semiotics, in: Tasso Barbé (ed.), Semiotics Unfolding: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotics I (Berlin 1983), 75-89. 2) Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. 1980). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1998 Mnemosyne, Vol. LI, Fasc. 5 539 by introducing the role of the as-yet-non-existent discipline of semiotics. According to de Man, among the three language-focused disciplines that constitute the trivium, logic is closer than grammar and rhetoric to the quadrivium that accounts for the mediaeval scholar’s knowledge of the world. He does not bother to dwell on the tension between logic and rhetoric, but moves to discuss the discrepancy between grammar and rhetoric, grammar and logic, which French semiologists such as Todorov and Genette have failed to notice, as revealed by their conflation of the 3 trivium in such titles as Grammar of the Decameron and Figures III ), De Man seems to be suggesting a new spectrum of relationships among the seven arts, based on their truth-claims or their transitivity to the world under investigation, and that rhetoric, with the sig nified truth bracketed, standing at one extreme of the spectrum, is less ‘transitive’ than any other discipline. Notwithstanding the seven arts’ intransitivity, de Man’s attempt at reconstructing semiology in the trivium has opened up a line of inquiry into the disciplinary origin and history of semiotics. As is well-known now, the liberal education of seven arts, though traceable to classical antiquity, is formulated in the late Roman period and the early Middle Ages, in particular, by Martianus Capella in his De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 4) and Boethius in his commentaries on or adaptations of Aristotle, Nicomachus, Porphyry, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Cicero. Although Boethius coins only the term ‘quadrivium’ in his De Institutione Arithmetica, and the term ‘trivium’ is only a mediaeval derivation, it is essentially his structure of the seven arts that is to be followed throughout the Middle Ages5). Boethius makes the distinction between ‘trivium’ and quadrivium already on the basis of the former’s linguistic instrumentality as organika and the latter’s coverage of areas of speculative knowledge. A question can be raised here: Does the trivium’s instrumentality serve the purpose of the quadrivium? Or, is there transitivity between the two, i.e., three paths leading to four paths? The answer seems to be both negative and positive. If one examines the quadrivium, one finds all the four Pythagorean mathematical sciences－arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the order being different in Martianus and Boethius)－have their own distinct representational sys tem which is non-verbally 3) Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilk e. and Proust (New Haven 1979). De Man has himself conflated two kinds of rhetoric, i.e., as figurative language and as persuasion, in order to accommodate his metahis tory of modern critical discourse since French ‘semiology’. In this metahistory the first kind of rhetoric is equivalent to the semantic (and syntactic) universe of the literary text, or the first semiotic order of signification; and the second kind to pragmatics, or the second semiotic order of communication. Thus the paradigm shift in literary linguistics around the early 1970s can be accounted for by the classical tension between rhetoric and logic. Meanwhile, one could argue that the relationships among the three units of the trivium have never remained stable and therefore call for radical historicization. Then this would be the problem of Charles Sanders Peirce too (see below). The same can be said of rhetoric. Compare its modem variations in Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth, and you will see its wide semantic range. 540 symbolic, nor does it need re-articulation in a metalanguage, although neither Martianus nor Boethius can afford not to use language as a modelling and interpreting system. Unlike what our authors and their commentators believe, because of the inconvertibility of systems, not only is there an unbridgeable gap between the trivium and the quadrivium, but also there is another gap between the quadrivium as abstract speculations and the absolute knowledge in the incorporeal world to which they aspire. In the enclosed logocentric system, the signifier of quadrivium points nostalgically but futilely towards the ultimate signified that is the harmonious order of divine creation. It is no accident that Charles Sanders Peirce formulates his general semiotic in terms of the trivium. First he explicitly equates semiotic to logic 6); but in his characteristically cryptic argument for triads, semiotic contains three branches: pure grammar, logic proper, and pure rhetoric because every sign (representamen) is connected with three things－ ground, object, and interpretant. Logic as semiotic (or the other way around, semiotic as logic) subsumes the trivium, including logic itself. 4) Minneus Felix Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana), rev. ed., ed. Adolf Dick (Stuttgart 1969); De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. James Willis (Leipzig 1983); The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, vol. 2 of Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 84), 2 vols, ed. William Harris Stahl (New York and Oxford 1977). All the Latin quotations are from the Dick edition and hereinafter cited as De Nuptiis; and all the English quotations are from the Stahl transla tion and hereinafter cited as The Marriage. Unless otherwise indicated, they are cited by verse numbers in the text rather than separately footnoted. 5) Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De Institutione Arithmetica, ed. and trans. Michael Masi, in: Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica (Studies in Classical Antiquity, 6) (Amsterdam 1983), 69-188. For Boethius on the quadrivium, see, for example, Alison White, Boethius in the Medieval Quadrivium, in: Margaret Gibson (ed.), Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford 1981), 162-205; Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford 1981). The word quadrivium (early manuscripts show quadruvium) first appears in the Proemium of Book I of Boethius’s De Institutione Arithmetica where the author observes: ‘Among all the men of ancient authority who, following the lead of Pythagoras, have flourished in the purer reasoning of the mind, it is clearly obvious that hardly anyone has been able to reach the highest perfection of the disciplines of philosophy unless the nobility of such wisdom was investigated by him in a certain four-part study, the quadrivium...’ (71). Credits must also be given to Boethius’s predecessors, such as Varro, Macrobius, Augustine, and Martianus Capella. 6) Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., vols. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur Burks (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), 2.227. The citation of Peirce here follows the standardized practice by referring to the volume number first and section number next. 541 Or perhaps one should say: LOGIC as theory of signs covers the trivium, including logic proper, which is not LOGIC proper. This word- play is not so trivial as it first appears if seen in the light of the fortune of rhetoric in 12th- and 13th-century scholasticism, where dialectic dominates the trivium, and rhe toric is even reduced to a branch of logic 7).

Load more