Here Thomas takes a step forward. He recognizes that, just as humans have ways of signifying to each other, alternately and intentionally, sadness and delight, the same is true of animals, and he thus touches on a problem that will be treated at greater length by Roger Bacon, who will distinguish between the moan that the sick man utters inadvertently and the interjection that he utters intentionally, following a certain linguistic convention, to signify the same pain, in however conceptually imperfect a manner.44
But, in this way, within the same Thomist system, the latratus canis changes position, as if, halfway between the voces significativae naturaliter (among which we find the gemitus) and the voces ad placitum (where we find spoken language), we were to locate an intermediate zone, in which humans produce (paralinguistically, we would say today) interjections, while dogs bark. In fact, in this revised classification, the real difference between human and canine language lies not in the opposition intentional/unintentional (vaguely touched upon, but basically eluded), and not only in that between natural and ad placitum, but in the opposition between the interjection and the ability of human language to express abstractions by means of which humans set up domum et civitatem (“ergo homo est naturale animal domesticum et civile”)—an affirmation that Thomas takes up from Aristotle’s Politics 1253 at 9–30, where Aristotle opposes human language, capable of producing concepts and abstractions, to the inarticulate sounds of animals, expressive merely of pleasure or pain.
4.2.8. Roger Bacon
Not unmindful of Augustine’s provocation, enter at this point Roger Bacon. The classification of signs outlined in Bacon’s De signis strikes us in many ways as syncretistic and as yet unresolved. The eccentricities of this classification find their explanation in a project whose results will be seen in later semiotics, especially in Ockham. Briefly, up until Bacon, thanks to the Aristotelian vulgate, words signify the passions of the soul (concepts, universal species), species bear an iconic relationship to things, and words, through the mediation of species, serve to name things (nominantur singularia, sed universalia significantur, “they name individual things while they signify universals”). With the De signis, on the other hand, words begin to signify directly individual things, of which the species intelligibiles are the mental counterpart. But the link between words and species becomes secondary and is reduced to a purely symptomatic relationship. Bacon has grasped the difference between symbola and semeia in De interpretatione 16a but, on the basis of a philologically correct reading, he elaborates a philosophically unfaithful reading. In other words, he erases the fact that for Aristotle words may be symptoms of the passions of the mind, but in the first instance they signify them directly, and he concludes that words are symptoms of the species that are formed in the mind.45 We have endeavored to reconstruct Bacon’s classification in Figure 4.8.
In commenting on this figure, let us say at once that that the “natural signs” ought to correspond to those of Augustine, which are produced without any intention, but it is unclear on what grounds Bacon distinguishes between those of the first and those of the third type. It would appear that, whereas in the third type we have a clear relationship of cause and effect, in those of the first type we have simply a relationship of concomitance among events (in the case of those classified as necessary the concomitance is certain, while for the probable ones it is uncertain). But it remains obscure why the ground being wet as a probable sign of a previous rain shower is not classified among the vestigia. Still more embarrassing is the curious collocation of the imagines (intentionally produced by man) among the natural signs. Bacon explains this with the fact that what is made intentionally is the object (the statue), while the resemblance between the statue and the real person is due to a certain homology between the form of the signans and that of the signatum.46 What interests us more is the classification of the signs produced by an intention of the soul, where Bacon perceives an intention even in the case of sounds emitted instinctively, without any intervention on the part of reason or even will, as an immediate movement of the sensitive soul (such as the moaning of the sick and animal noises).
Figure 4.8
Now, the signs ordered by the soul, but without rational deliberation or election of the will, are said to function naturaliter. They have, however, nothing to do with the natural signs. The latter were called natural with reference to nature as substance; the former are called natural because they are set in motion by a movement of nature. Be that as it may, the distinction is clear: the signa naturalia do not appear as the consequence of an intention, on the part of either humans or animals, while the moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog have their origin in a movement of the sensitive soul that tends to express what the animal (human or no) is feeling. And so in this classification the barking of the dog, without being placed alongside Holy Scripture and separated from the mourning of the dove, as it was in Augustine, is not a mere symptom either.
Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that the crow of the rooster appears twice in this classification. There is a cockcrow that is a sign of what time of day it is and a cockcrow that is instead a linguistic act, even if we do not happen to understand its purport.
When Bacon compares these two cases he uses a different terminology. When the cockcrow appears among the signs ordinata ab anima, it is referred to as “cantus galli,” while when it appears as a symptom it is referred to as “gallum cantare”: “cantus galli nichil proprie nobis significat tamquam vox significativa, sed gallum cantare significant nobis horas.” The natural sign is not the cockcrow itself, but the fact that the cock crows (the Stoics would have called it an incorporeal). Now, in the De signis, whom the cock is crowing to (whether to other cocks or to humans) is not specified, but the same theme is picked up again in the Sumulae Dialectices.47
Here Bacon is quite clear: a significant vox is the one by which any animal can communicate with another animal of the same species, in other words there are voces significativae naturaliter that all members of a species understand, and others (the ones that are ad placitum) that are understood only by subgroups of the same human species, as is the case with articulate languages. That animals understand each other can be seen from their behavior, as when, for example, the mother hen warns her chicks of the threat of the hawk. So the rooster speaks with different words according to the circumstances and is understood by the other members of his species, just as the ass is understood by the ass and the lion by the lion.
All humans need is a little training, and they too will be able to understand the language of the beasts. As will be further clarified by Pseudo-Marsilius of Inghen:48 the dog certainly barks in order to signify something, and it is irrelevant whether everyone understands what he means, it is enough that those who understand the characteristics and habits of dogs understand.
This said, the table of zoosemiotic situations has been fully explored: the dog who speaks to the dog, the dog whose bark man interprets because he knows the dog’s habits and therefore his language, and even the animal who speaks human words, like the magpie or the parrot (but this is a case of learned behavior and mechanical execution on the animal’s part, and the problem has nothing to do with a theory of signs).49
With Bacon’s espousal of the zoosemiotic revaluation of an Augustine who is closer to Greek culture, the barking dog definitively joins the ranks of those who, in one way or another, express themselves, because the behavior of animals who twitter, howl, squeak, and roar as they go about their associative lives will henceforth be regarded with a greater sensitivity to the facts of nature.50
It is no accident that we are now entering a period in which the figurative arts too have progressed, in their representation of nature, from the stylizations of the Romanesque to the realism of the Gothic.
Exit the allegorical animal of the bestiary. From now on, whimpers, barks, whinnies, and roars ring out in the symbolic forest inhabited by the beasts, who now say whatever they feel like saying and not what the Physiologus would have them say, thereby refusing to become quasi liber et pictura and just being themselves.51
The second part of this essay chapter incorporates a research project that first appeared under my name, together with those of Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni. The project took shape in a seminar on the history of semiotics at the University of Bologna (during the academic year 1982–1983). After being presented at the Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (see Spoleto 1985), it was published in English in Eco and Marmo, On the Medieval Theory of Signs (1989). For the present book, I have rewritten it, taking into account contributions that have appeared more recently, unburdening
