local dialect. You would not affirm, I hope, that men gathered in a council on the Thames, on the Rhine, on the Ob, or on the Po, found by pure chance the same sounds to express the same ideas. The two words already existed in the two languages, and these languages subsequently donated them to the two dialects. Would you maintain that the four races inherited them from an earlier race? I do not believe so, and yet, I admit, it emerges first of all that the two immense families, the Teutonic and the Slavic, did not arbitrarily invent these two words but received them from others. At this point the same problem arises with regard to the antecedent nations: where did they get these words from? And in this case, too, we must reply that they learned them from others, and so we go back in time to the origin of all things. (133–134)

[Thesis of autonomous invention] The candles that are being brought in to us at this moment make me think of their name in French: bougies. At one time the French were engaged in great commerce with the city of Botzia in the kingdom of Fez; they imported from there a large quantity of wax candles, which they began to call botzies. The national genius very quickly transformed this term and produced bougies. The English has retained the ancient expression wax candles, whereas the German prefers to say Wachslicht. In every case, however, you can rediscover the reason that originated the term. If I had not found the etymology of the word bougie in the preface to Thomassin’s Hebrew dictionary, where I would never have deliberately looked for it, would I have been less certain of any etymology? To doubt it, the flame of analogy would have to be extinguished: one would have to renounce reason. (134–135)

[Thesis of original iconism] Observe, if you please, the very word etymology. It is itself a great proof of the prodigious talent of antiquity in discovering or adapting the most perfect words: it presupposes, in fact, that every word is true, that is to say, not arbitrarily imagined, which is already enough to orient an upright spirit. The things that we know on this point are very enlightening. … An arbitrary sound has never expressed an idea, nor has it ever been able to. As thought necessarily exists before words, which are only the exterior expression of that thought, so words exist before the flowering of every new language, which receives them as they are, then alters them as it pleases. The genius of each language roams like an animal that wishes to unearth, wherever it may be, what best suits him. (135–136)

[Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing] In our French language, for example, maison is of Celtic derivation, palais is Latin, basilique is Greek, rabot is Slavic, honnir is Teutonic, al-manach is Arabic, and sopha is Hebrew. From where did all this come? It is not really important to know that, at least for the moment; it suffices for me to demonstrate to you that languages are formed only from other languages, which they kill normally to feed on them, like carnivorous animals. (136–137)

The passage concludes: “Let us never speak then of ‘chance’ or of arbitrary signs” (137). Yet, on the contrary, all the arguments that have gone before seem to militate in favor of a supreme arbitrariness of decisions on the part of the languages. And we are puzzled by the question “Where did all this come from?” which insinuates the idea of a deep source of words. We have just been told where they come from: Celtic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew.

We have said that the four theses contemporaneously enunciated are not compatible. We will be more specific: all together, they are not compatible with a strong idea of the birth and development of languages, but they would be compatible if we admitted that languages are a historical-cultural phenomenon, that they grow without an order decided by a supernatural will, and that they gradually arrive at their stability through borrowings (deliberate or unconscious), poetic inventions, conventional whims and “iconic” attempts. But in this case languages would achieve their organic condition just as, from an evolutionist perspective devoid of any idea of providence, only giraffes would survive in certain conditions because they have the longest necks.

This is what Maistre cannot accept. And this is how he then concludes his linguistic excursus: with a series of thoughts, each of them perhaps acceptable, though when taken all together they seem a fireworks display of non sequiturs.

If you wish me to express myself in another fashion, I will say that the word is eternal, whereas a language is as old as the nation that speaks it. You rebut, without giving the matter enough thought, that no nation can understand any longer its own ancient language. But, pray, what importance does that have? Does change that does not affect principle perhaps destroy identity? Would someone who saw me in my cradle perhaps recognize me today? And yet I believe I am entitled to say I am the same being I was then. And so it is with a language: a language is always the same, as long as the people that speaks it is the same. The poverty of languages at their beginnings is another supposition imposed by all the force and authority of philosophy. New words prove nothing, because, gradually, as the language acquires them, it drops others, and we do not know in what proportion. The only certainty is that every people has spoken, and has spoken precisely insofar as it thought and as it thought; in fact, it would be absurd to believe that there is a sign for a nonexistent concept, as it would be absurd to believe a concept does not have a sign to make itself known. (141–142)

It is true that the Soirées record conversations, but surely in this philosophical dialogue Maistre did not wish to give the impression of inconclusive chatter. The lack of conclusion, the iron chain of non sequiturs, reveals a method, not an interlocutory lapse.

For that matter, Maistre himself said as much. Look again at the passage entitled Thesis of autonomous invention, and you will see that, in order to believe in etymologies, the “flame of analogy” must not be extinguished, reasoning must not be renounced. This is Maistre’s idea of Reason: to reason means to entrust oneself to any analogy that establishes an unbroken network of contacts between every thing and every other thing. This can be said, and it must be done, because it has been assumed that this network has existed since the Origin; indeed, it is itself the basis of all knowledge.

It is typical of reactionary thought to establish a double equation, between Truth and Origin and between Origin and Language. The Thought of Tradition serves only to confirm a mystical belief that arrests any further reasoning.

NOTES

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, the passages quoted in the text are Umberto Eco’s translations into English of the originals or my translations into English from his translations into Italian.

1 THE FORCE OF FALSITY

1. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (New York: Greenwood, 1991).
2. J. L. E. Dreyer, History of Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1906); E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (1950; trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961)
3. Andrew Dickson White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1896).
4. Charles Singer, ed., Studies in the History and Method of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917–1921);A. Holt-Jensen, Geography: Its History and Concepts (London, 1988); Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983).
5. See also, for the considerations that follow, Gioia Zaganelli, La lettera di Prete Gianni (Parma: Pratiche, 1990).
6. Cf. Umberto Eco, “Fakes and Forgeries,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
7. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
8. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 21–22, 21.
9. I am well aware that I retold this story in both Foucault’s Pendulum and Six Walks, but it is always a good idea to repeat it, and unfortunately it can never be repeated enough. As always, the information, apart from some personal excursions into the world of the roman feuilleton, derives in great part from Norman Cohn’s Warrant for a Genocide (New York: Harper, 1967) and from that inexhaustible store of anti-Semite arguments, Nesta Weber’s Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).
10. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1969).
11. Arles: Actes Sud, 1994.

2 LANGUAGES IN PARADISE

1. See my Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
2. Maria Corti, Dante a un nuovo crocevia (Florence: Libreria Commissionaria Sansoni, 1981).
3. Naturally, English-language readers must remember that I in Italian is not a personal pronoun and can at most be read as a plural article (corresponding to the). But to the ear of Italian readers, in this context, it does not sound as such.
4. Moshe Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).
5. Sefer or ha-Sekhel, in ibid., 14.
6. Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience of Abraham Abulafia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 21.
7. Idel, Language, Torah, 102
8. Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth, “‘Pommes d’or masquées d’argent’: Les sonnets italiens de Manoel Giudeo (Immanuel de Rome),” Paris.
9. Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964), 373.

3 FROM MARCO POLO TO LEIBNIZ

1. Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à Dacier (Paris: Didot, 1822), 11–12.
2. The Bestiary, ed. T. H. White (New York: Putnam’s, 1960), 117–118.
3. Athanasius Kircher, Obeliscus Pamphilius (Rome: Grigani, 1650) II, 5, 114–120.
4. Champollion, Lettre à Dacier, 29.
5. John Wilkins, Mercury; or, The Secret and Swift