Figure 1.13
As usual, not only is it impossible to distinguish a dog from a wolf, but, in addition, the information that the “characters” of Wilkins’s alphabet transmit is simply that the dog (Zita in the universal language) is “the first member of the specific pair of the fifth difference of the genus Beasts.”
It is not until we consult the extremely crammed encyclopedic tables which Wilkins places after his classifications that we learn that viviparous animals have feet with toes, rapacious animals usually have six sharp incisors and two long fangs to hold their prey, the Dog-kind have round heads which distinguish them from the Cat-kind whose heads are more oblong in shape, while the largest of the canines are subdivided into “domesticated-tame” and “wild-hostile to sheep”: this is the only way for us to grasp the difference between a dog and a wolf.
Wilkins’s philosophical language taxonomizes but it does not define. In order to define, the system must have recourse to a miscellany of information expressed in a natural language that takes the form of an encyclopedia.
The defect that becomes evident in Wilkins’s failure is the same defect that undermines any notion of a dictionary that sets itself the aim of being rigorous. In order for a dictionary to be totally independent of any additional knowledge of the world, its terms must be primitives not further definable—otherwise the tree would forfeit its nature as a device capable of guaranteeing the exactitude of the definitions it generates. But, in Wilkins’s case, it is clear that the mass of encyclopedic information underlying the organization of the tables according to supposed primitives is in fundamental contradiction with the compositional character according to traits that appeared to be being realized in his “characteristic” language. The primitives are not primitives. Not only are Wilkins’s species combinations of genera and differences (a weakness already typical of a Porphyrean Tree, given that the differences are accidents not subject to hierarchization), but furthermore they are names used as hooks on which to hang encyclopedic descriptions.
Nevertheless, precisely because it is impure, Wilkins’s system is susceptible of another reading, no longer as a dictionary but as a hypertext, in our contemporary meaning of the term. If a hypertext links every node or element of its repertory, by means of a multiplicity of internal cross-references, to a multiplicity of other nodes, one could imagine a hypertext regarding animals that inserts dog into a general classification of mammals, in a tree of taxa that also includes cats, oxen, and wolves. But if in that tree one points to dog (precisely in the modern computer sense of clicking on it), one is directed to a repertory of information concerning the properties and habits of dogs. Selecting another type of connection, one can also access a list of the various roles played by dogs in different historical periods, or a list of images of dogs in art history. Perhaps this is where Wilkins was headed, when he thought of considering Defense both in terms of the duties of the citizen as well as in terms of military strategy.
1.3.6. Leibniz
Still, we cannot credit Wilkins with an idea he never formulated. The figure who did in some sense express it was Leibniz, perhaps because the opposition between dictionary and encyclopedia characterized his entire research. In fact, starting with his 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, explicitly inspired by Llull, he will pursue throughout his life the ideal of a characteristica universalis, a rational language, based on a limited number of primitives and logical rules, that would permit wise men to sit around a table and arrive at the truth by way of a calculemus (“let us calculate”). But he quickly becomes convinced that there is no assurance that the primitive terms one arrives at cannot be further broken down into components, and he admits that at best they may be postulated as such for the convenience of the calculus. In such a context, he is more concerned with the form of the propositions that the calculus is able to generate than he is with the meaning of the terms—and he compares in fact his characteristica to an algebra that can be applied, with quantitative rigor, to qualitative notions. And, like algebra, it is a form of cogitatio caeca (or “blind reasoning”) that allows us to perform calculations, and to arrive at exact results, using symbols of whose significance we are not able to have a clear and distinct idea. In so doing Leibniz certainly launched the development of a formal logic in which the symbols do not refer back to a precise idea but stand in its stead.
But when on the other hand he thinks in terms of a review of universal knowledge, Leibniz assumes an entirely different stance, and in various writings he compares an encyclopedia to a library as a general inventory of all knowledge. In his 1679 Consilium de Encyclopaedia nova conscribendi methodo inventoria, he proposes an encyclopedia that would take in rational grammar, logic, the arts of memory, universal mathematics and its technical applications (geodetics, architecture, optics), mechanics, the science of the physical and chemical properties of bodies, mineralogy, botany and agronomy, animal biology and medicine, ethics, geopolitics, and natural theology. As was the case for Bacon, this encyclopedia must remain open: its order will be discovered little by little as science progresses, and it must also include the unwritten knowledge that is dispersed among people of different professions.
In his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, written in 1703–1705, he reminds us that the encyclopedia must have “many cross-references from one place to another, given the fact that most things can be seen from several different points of view, and a truth can be collocated in different places according to the different relationships it has: the people who organize a library often do not know where to classify certain books and remain undecided among two or three equally appropriate placements” (VI, 31). What Leibniz has in mind is what we would call a polydimensional encyclopedia, in which allowance has been made for multiple transversal connections (Gensini 1990: 19).
1.3.7. The Encyclopédie
In fact Leibniz anticipates the project later theorized by D’Alembert in the opening pages of the Encyclopédie, and it is on the basis of Leibniz’s suggestions that, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the premises for a critique of any attempt to found an a priori system of ideas begin to take shape. The Enlightenment encyclopedia is determined to be critical and scientific: it refuses to censor any belief, even those considered erroneous, but it exposes them for what they are (see, for instance, the entry on the unicorn, which appears to describe the animal according to tradition, but at the same time underscores its legendary nature). Following the model of the ancient encyclopedia, it aspires to give an account of the entirety of human knowledge, even the “mechanical” knowledge associated with arts and crafts.
True, the model of the Enlightenment encyclopedia is based on a kind of tree-like pattern (Figure 1.14).
Figure 1.14
But D’Alembert, in his “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie, while providing information concerning the criteria according to which the work was organized—not immediately obvious given its alphabetical rearrangement—develops on the one hand the metaphor of the tree while simultaneously calling it into question, speaking instead of a “terrestrial globe” and of a labyrinth:
The general system of the sciences and the arts is a sort of labyrinth, a tortuous road which the intellect enters without quite knowing what direction to take.… However philosophic this disorder may be on the part of the soul, an encyclopedic tree which attempted to portray it would be disfigured, indeed utterly destroyed.…
Finally, the system of our knowledge is composed of different branches, several of which have a common point of union. Since it is not possible, starting out from this point, to begin following all the routes simultaneously, it is the nature of the different minds that determines which route is chosen.…
It is not the same with the encyclopedic arrangement of our knowledge. This consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and the arts simultaneously. From there he can see at a glance the objects of their speculations and the operations which can be made on these objects; he can discern the general branches of human knowledge, the points that separate or unite them; and sometimes he can even glimpse the secrets that relate them to one another. It is a kind of world map which is to show the principal countries, their position and their mutual dependence, the road that leads directly from one to the other. This road is often cut by a thousand obstacles, which are known in each country only to the inhabitants or to travelers, and which cannot be represented except in individual, highly detailed maps. These individual maps will be the different articles of the Encyclopedia and the Tree or Systematic Chart will be its world map.
But as, in the case of the general maps of the globe we inhabit, objects will be near or far and will have different appearances according to the vantage point at which the eye is placed by the geographer constructing the map, likewise the form of the encyclopedic tree will depend on the vantage point one assumes in viewing the universe of letters. Thus one can
