We have no need to ask ourselves just how congruous this list is. Incongruity seems to be typical of all of the efforts made in the Baroque period to give an account of the global contents of a field of knowledge, just as it is equally characteristic of many seventeenth-century projects for artificial languages. Gaspar Schott, in his Technica curiosa (1664) and his Joco-seriorum naturae et artis sive magiae naturalis centuriae tres (ca. 1666) gave notice of a work published in 1653, whose author’s name he claims to have forgotten. In fact the anonymous author seems to have been a certain Pedro Bermudo (1610–1648), a Spanish Jesuit who presented in Rome an Artificium or Arithmeticus nomenclator, mundi omnes nationes ad linguarum et sermonis unitatem invitans. Authore linguae (quod mirere) Hispano quodam, vere, ut dicitur, muto.25 It is doubtful whether Schott’s is a faithful description, but the issue is irrelevant, since, even if Schott had reworked the project after his own fashion, what interests us is the incongruity of the list. The Artificium provided for forty-four fundamental classes, which are worth listing here, giving only a few examples in parentheses:
- Elements (fire, wind, smoke, ash, hell, purgatory, and the center of the earth). 2. Celestial entities (stars, thunderbolts, the rainbow). 3. Intellectual entities (God, Jesus, speech, opinion, suspicion, soul, stratagem, or ghost). 4. Secular states (emperor, barons, plebs). 5. Ecclesiastical states. 6. Artificers (painter and sailor). 7. Instruments. 8. Affections (love, justice, lust). 9. Religion. 10. Sacramental confession. 11. Tribunal. 12. Army. 13. Medicine (doctor, hunger, clyster). 14. Brute beasts. 15. Birds. 16. Reptiles and fish. 17. Parts of animals. 18. Furnishings. 19. Foodstuffs. 20. Beverages and liquids (wine, beer, water, butter, wax, resin). 21. Clothing. 22. Silk fabrics. 23. Wools. 24. Canvas and other woven cloths. 25. Navigation and spices (ship, cinnamon, anchor, chocolate). 26. Metals and coins. 27. Various artifacts. 28. Stones. 29. Jewels. 30. Trees and fruit. 31. Public places. 32. Weights and measures. 33. Numerals. 39. Time. 40. Adjectives. 41. Adverbs. 42. Prepositions. 43. Persons (pronouns, titles such as Your Eminence). 44. Travel (hay, road, highway robber).26
Around 1660 Athanasius Kircher had composed a Novum hoc inventum quo omnia mundi idiomata ad unum reducuntur (“New invention by which all the languages of the world can be reduced to one”) still surviving only in manuscript form,27 which proposed a fairly elementary grammar and a dictionary of 1620 “words,” in which he endeavored to establish a list of fifty-four fundamental categories capable of being represented by means of iconograms. His iconograms recall those in use today in airports and stations—sometimes they represent an object, such as a small wineglass, sometimes they are purely geometrical (a rectangle, a triangle, a circle), while some of them are superficially inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs. Without going into detail (see Marrone 1986 and Eco 1993: 9), we may simply note that the fifty-four categories of the Novum Inventum also constitute a notably incongruous list, including as they do divine, angelic, and celestial entities, elements, human beings, animals, vegetables, minerals, the dignities and other abstract concepts of Llull’s Ars Magna, beverages, clothing, weights, numbers, hours, cities, foodstuffs, family, actions like seeing or giving, adjectives, adverbs, the months of the year. But let us get back to Tesauro.
Tesauro follows the bent of his time. But what seems to us a lack of the systematic spirit is on the contrary evidence of the effort made by the encyclopedist to avoid arid classification according to genera and species. It is the as yet unordered accumulation (or barely ordered, in Tesauro’s case, under the rubrics of the ten categories and their members) that will later permit the invention (in the Baconian sense, not of recovery but of discovery) of unexpected and original relationships between the objects of knowledge. This impression of a “hodgepodge” is the price we have to pay, not to achieve completeness but to eschew the poverty of any classification in the form of a tree.
We have only to see what Tesauro makes of his warehouse of notions. If we were searching for a good metaphor for a dwarf (though for Tesauro discovering metaphors means, as it did for Aristotle, coming up with new definitions for things or discovering everything that can be said about a given object), from this repertory we could already derive the definitions of Myrmidon (the name is related to “ant”) or the little mouse at whose birth the mountains were in labor. But to this index there is added another that, for every small thing, depending on which of the ten categories we consider, decides, under Quantity, what the small thing is commensurate with or what parts it has; under Quality, whether it is visible or what deformities it has; under Relation, to whom or with what it is related, whether it is material and what form it has; under Action and Passion, what it can and cannot do, and so on. And once we have asked ourselves what the small thing is commensurate with, the Index ought to refer us, for example, to “the Measure of the Geometric Finger.”28
Proceeding in this way through each category, we could say of the dwarf that he is shorter than his own name, more an embryo than a man, a fragment of humanity, far smaller than a thumb, so insubstantial as to be without color, sure to be the loser in a fight with a fly, so tiny you can’t tell whether he is sitting, standing or lying down, and so on.
The Index, precisely because of its labyrinthine nature, allows us to make connections between each object and every other object—so that it seems that all Tesauro’s metaforeta or metaphor maker can do (and all he delights in doing) is deriving new knowledge from the deconstruction of a Porphyrian tree.
Although, out of devotion to Aristotle, Dante’s “master of all those who know” (Inferno IV, 131), and his works, Tesauro opted to call his index “categorical,” what he in fact provides is a procedure to pursue the infinite paths of a labyrinth, in which the subdivisions according to categories are nothing more than provisional and ultimately arbitrary constructions designed to contain somehow or other material that is in a constant state of ferment.
1.3.5. Wilkins
The point of greatest tension between tree and labyrinth is reached in seventeenth-century England, in the ambit of the Royal Society, where various projects for an a priori philosophical language (such as Lodwick’s A Common Writing, Becks’s The Universal Character, Dalgarno’s Ars signorum or the Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language by Wilkins) are formulated, in which “characters” comprehensible to people who speak different languages are called upon to represent a global structure of the world.
What these systems discuss is the possibility of representing the meanings of each term through a punctiliously exhibited hierarchical arrangement of subdivisions from genera to species, while at the same time giving an account of the nonregimentable multiplicity of notions that common speakers have at their disposal. The problem these systems find themselves having to face is that, if one chooses a tree classification, according to the dictionary model, it is impossible to give an account either of the meaning of the terms or the nature of the things designated, and therefore the nodes of every tree-like classification must be filled in with encyclopedic specifications, with sums of properties, in other words, that can neither be defined or classified.
Referring the reader to Eco (1993) for a more detailed analysis of these systems and the relevant bibliography, we will confine ourselves in this context to considering briefly Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character, the most complete and fully worked-out project of them all. Wilkins conducted a kind of colossal review of all knowledge and produced a table of 40 major Genera, proceeding to subdivide them into 251 peculiar Differences, from which he derived 2,030 Species (presented in pairs). The table of 40 Genera (Figure 1.12) starts out with very general concepts like Creator and World and, by means of a division into substances and accidents, animate and inanimate substances, vegetative and sensitive creatures, arrives at Stones, Metals, Trees, Birds, or accidents like Magnitude, Space, Sensible Qualities, Economical Relations.
Figure 1.12
More detailed still are the tables that allow us to arrive at individual species, in which Wilkins proposes to classify, for instance, even a beverage like beer, in order to represent the entire notional universe of a seventeenth-century Englishman. With regard to this system of ideas (which Wilkins, clearly erring on the side of ethnocentricity, presumes to be common to all mankind), the “real characters” that he proposes are signs (which assume both a written form, almost hieroglyphic in nature, and an oral form, transcribed in pronounceable alphabetic characters). Thus, if De signifies Element, and Deb the first difference (Fire), then Deba will denote the first species, which is Flame.
Here, however, we are not interested in Wilkins’s writing proposals (essential though they may be to his project for a universal language), but in the criteria he uses to organize the notions. Once again, the mere classification does not permit us to recognize a Flame or to assert that it burns. Even when we get down to the single species we find divisions according to which, given the category Viviparous Clawed Beasts, subdivided into Rapacious and Non-Rapacious, under Rapacious we find Cat-kind and Dog-kind, the latter being
