From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  16. For a reconstruction of the process in semiotic terms, see Pellerey (1984).

  17. “Intellectus possibilis intelligit hominem non secundum quod est HIC homo sed in quantum est HOMO simpliciter, secundum rationem speciei” (“The possible intellect understands man, not as THIS man, but simply as MAN, according to man’s specific nature”) (Contra gentiles II, 73).

  18. “Singulare in rebus materialibus intellectus noster directe et primo cognoscere non potest. Cuius ratio est, quia principium singularitatis in rebus materialibus est material individualis, intellectus autem noster, sicut supra dictum est, intelligit abstrahendo speciem intelligibilem ab huiusmodi material. Quod autem a materia individuali abstrahitur, est universale. Unde intellectus noster directe non est cognoscitivus nisu universalium. Indirecte autem, et quasi per quandam reflexionem, potest cognoscere singulare, quia, sicut supra dictum est, etiam postquam species intelligibiles abstraxit, non potest secundum eas actu intelligere nisi convertendo se ad phantasmata, in quibus species intelligibiles intelligit, ut dicitur in III de anima. Sic igitur ipsum universale per speciem intelligibilem directe intelligit; indirecte autem singularia, quorum sunt phantasmata. Et hoc modo format hanc propositionem, Socrates est homo” (“Directly and immediately our intellect cannot know the singular in material realities. The reason is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, and our intellect—as said before—understands by abstracting species from this sort of matter. But what is abstracted from individual matter is universal. Therefore our intellect has direct knowledge only of universals. Indirectly and by a quasi-reflection, on the other hand, the intellect can know the singular, because, as mentioned before, even after it has abstracted species it cannot actually understand by means of them except by a return to sense images in which it understands the species, as Aristotle says [in De anima III]. Therefore, in this sense, it is the universal that the intellect understands directly by means of the species, and singulars (represented in sense images) only indirectly. And it is in this way that it formulates the proposition, ‘Socrates is a man’ ”) (Summa Theologiae I, 86, 1 co.). “Species igitur rei, secundum quod est in phantasmatibus, non est intelligibilis actu.… Sicut nec species coloris est sensata in actu secundum quod est in lapide, sed solum secundum quod est in pupilla” (“Wherefore the species of a thing according as it is in the phantasms is not actually intelligible … even so neither is the species of color actually perceived according as it is in the stone, but only according as it is in the pupil) (Contra gentiles II, 59).

  19. On this resolution of the contemplation of the concrete in the discursive act of judgment, which characterizes Thomistic epistemology and is important if we are to understand the type of aesthetic that derives from it, we dealt at length in chapter 7 of Eco (1956) (English translation Eco [1988]). In what follows we will have occasion to mention the article by Roland-Gosselin, “Peut-on parler d’intuition intellectuelle dans la philosophie thomiste?” In open polemic with Maritain’s positions, he concluded: “Sensation is an intuition of the sensible as such. Reflection, or psychological awareness, is an intuition of our acts, but determined primarily by their object. The other ‘views,’ more or less direct and immediate, that we have at our disposal do not attain the single reality. To reach concrete existence, that of things or the substantial existence of the ego, a detour or a discourse is called for.” [“La sensation est une intuition du sensible comme tel. La réflexion, ou conscience psychologique, est une intuition de nos actes, mais déterminée premièrement par leur objet. Les autres ‘vues’ plus ou moins directes et immédiates, dont nous disposons, n’atteignent pas la réalité singulière. Pour rejoindre l’existence concrète, celle des choses ou l’existence substantielle du moi, un détour, ou un discours s’impose à elles”] (Roland-Gosselin 1930: 730).

  20. Only the external senses know individual things, but it is probably a metaphor to say that they know, because in fact they register and do not know themselves (Contra gentiles II, 66). On the limits of Thomistic epistemology, see also Mahoney (1982).

  21. In Eco (1956) we stated that this reconsideration of the concrete object occurs for Thomas only in the act of judgment. We could hardly compel him to say more, but the fact remains that in this way too the enjoyment of the concrete always takes place at rarefied intellectual heights, where the thing is considered only through the reflexio on what is already a phantasm. Could Thomas have failed to recognize that the thing, even after having been known (and reduced it to a phantasm), could be reconsidered through an activity that brought the senses into play once more? Not that he could not rule out the possibility that, after perceiving a thing a first time, we might perceive it again other times. He probably considered this event as a second act of perception, no different from the first, and his theory of knowledge obviously had to define the act of perception in its basic dynamic, without worrying about how often a human being may accidentally happen to perceive something. Which would perhaps explain why he was not interested in the type of experience that modern aesthetic theories have chosen to call intuitive because it seemed too complex to consider it as part of a process beginning over and over again, made up of hypotheses, inferences, trial and error. To conceive of such an idea, he would have had to speak not only of the possibility of a reflexio ad phantasmata but also of a subsequent reflexio ad qualitates sensibiles. In other words, he would have had to understand the comprehension of an object, not as a simple act, a simplex apprehensio, but as a never-ending process. Concerned, however, with guaranteeing the truth of our every perceptive contact with reality, he does not go so far; indeed he could not go so far. If we were to go back and come to terms with sensible experience after having grasped the quidditas, as if we might have made a mistake, then the entire doctrine of the intellect would be in trouble.

  22. See Summa Theologiae II–II, 45, 2. There are certain acts of virtue that we can judge and evaluate in the light of intellectual knowledge. But at the moment of acting, if the habitus is deeply rooted in us, the rule acts via a certain connaturality by which it is realized without our having a clear intellectual awareness. Knowledge by connaturality, if you like, but of a fixed rule, not the intuition of a hitherto unknown possibility of being. Sapientia is a gift of the Spirit, the connate ability to apply the right rule at the right moment. But sapentia presupposes the existence of fixed rules, plastically adaptable to contingent situations, but always in accord with a possibility that the intellect will subsequently be able to clarify. This is not the kind of knowledge that implies a reconstruction of the world along lines forever foreign to the intellect, understood by many of the Romantic and contemporary poets whom Maritain cites in support of his claims (from Novalis to Rimbaud and on to Char, Eluard, and John Crowe Ransom, etc.; see Maritain 1953: ch. 4).

  23. It has been pointed out that the whole of Eckhart’s implied aesthetics consists in the depiction of a tension toward a goal that is never realized, an aspiration that never finds rest. It finds its typical expression in the disproportionate verticalities of the Rhine cathedrals, whereas Thomistic aesthetics reminds us of the more composed Italian Gothic in which beauty is measured on a more human scale, capable of being perceived and enjoyed without requiring a violent laceration of the imagination and the sensibility (cf. Assunto 1961).

  24. For Coleridge, poetry is an act of analogical knowledge based on love. As he states in On Poesy or Art: “The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure and discourses to us by symbols, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love” (http://www.bartleby.com/27/17.html). There exists, beyond the language of artificially stimulated hallucination, the possibility of a more authentic language of nature, through which the invisible communicates its existence to finite being. Nature is an alphabet, says Coleridge, and, obsessed by the mystery of the hieroglyph, he declares that what we call nature is a poem that lies hidden in a secret and mysterious script. In the years during which he
composed what was to become his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge breaks with Kant and turns to Schelling, because he cannot tolerate Kant’s critical inflexibility or confine himself to phenomena. In chapter 13 “On the imagination,” he makes a demiurgic claim: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge 1983, I, 304). See also the following quotation from Anima Poetae: “In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolic language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.”

  25. For a review of these critiques, see Michel Lemoine’s afterword to the 1998 Albin Michel edition. If we insist on looking for absences in De Bruyne’s three volumes, the first great absence (somewhat surprisingly, since he belongs to the same Netherlandic culture) is Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, which contains a number of acute observations on the medieval aesthetic sensibility (and not merely in the later centuries upon whose threshold De Bruyne chose to stop). On the other hand, talking about absences, Curtius, who had read everything, published his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter] in 1948, and in it he fails to mention De Bruyne—perhaps because the Bruges edition, published two years earlier, seems to have had a practically clandestine circulation.

  26. But Edgar De Bruyne, reviewing Glunz in 1938 in the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, criticized him for not mentioning the great theoretical currents like the aesthetics of proportion and light, or the psychology of the Victorines.

  27. See Pouillon (1946).

  28. See Panofsky (1946).

  29. In the index of names, however, the reader should remember to look for Bruyne and not De Bruyne.

  30. The first study devoted by our author to Thomas is S. Thomas d’Aquin. Le milieu.—L’homme.—La vision du monde (Paris-Brussels: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1928).

  31. Not by everyone of course. It is worth recalling the Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series by Edmond de Coussemaker (Paris, 1864–1876), Clemens Baeumker’s Witelo (Münster, 1908), E. Lutz, “Die Ästhetik Bonaventuras,” in Festgabe zum 60: Geburstag Clem, Baeumker (Münster, 1913), Johan Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters [The Waning of the Middle Ages] (Haarlem, 1919), Walter Müller, Das Problem der Seelenschönheit im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1926), Clare Riedl, Grosseteste On Light (Milwaukee, 1942), Karl Svoboda, L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Paris-Brno 1927), not to mention Menendez y Pelayo (1883), Edmond Faral (1924), J. Schlosser Magnino (1924), H. H. Glunz (1937), and Henri Pouillon (1939).

  32. The goal of an historiographically correct reconstruction is not merely not to attempt to modernize one’s authors. Presenting them as they actually were sometimes renews their relevance, in the sense that it allows us to understand better the relationships between ourselves and certain cultural phenomena that had hitherto been difficult to fathom. We may take as an example one of the most intriguing chapters of the Études, that on Hisperic–Latin (or Hiberno-Latin) aesthetics (the fourth chapter of the first volume). Today we possess reliable critical editions of the Hisperica Famina (Herren, 1974) and of the Epitomae and Epistolae of Virgil of Toulouse (Polara, 1979), but De Bruyne was compelled to work with nineteenth-century sources or directly with the Patrologia. The literary sensibility with which he revisits the phenomenon of the Asiatic style is completely modern (and at times betrays a penchant for the stammering Latin of the dark centuries almost worthy of Huysmans), even if some of his critics have blamed him for appealing too casually to categories such as “Baroque.” True, he too was a man of his own day and had a number of reservations regarding that “barbaric” taste, whereas you and I might be tempted to see those barbarians as precursors of James Joyce. Lemoine (1998), however, reminds us that, at the same time and apropos of the same texts, Henri Leclerc in the Dictionnaire de l’Archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1920), which he compiled with Fernand Cabrol, insisted that the Irish monks who composed and read the Hisperica Famina “were madmen who nowadays would find themselves relegated to an asylum for the mentally infirm.” De Bruyne on the other hand was able to identify the links between these “demential” exercises and the miniatures of the Book of Kells and other masterpieces of Irish art, with the result that the pages he devotes to the Hisperic aesthetic are among the finest ever dedicated to this mysterious chapter of medieval culture.

  33. See, for example, on p. 508, apropos of the sentiment of the beautiful: “It is not until the 13th century that the problem of distinguishing between the higher and the lower senses is posited in an explicit fashion” [“Ce n’est qu’au XIIIe siècle que le problème de la distinction des sens supérieurs et inférieurs se pose de manière explicite”].

  34. See Deely (1985: 29), where, however, it seems fairly clear that for John (Poinsot) the notitia intuitiva is that of things present to the senses and therefore is to be identified with sensation.

  35. Which goes to show once again that De Bruyne had a keen awareness of a diachronic development in medieval aesthetic themes. And it was in an implied polemic vis-à-vis his professed conclusions, but using the same texts that he had made available, that I originally entitled my 1959 survey Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale (“The Development of Medieval Aesthetics”). The English translation, by Hugh Bredin, is entitled Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Eco 1986).

  36. The idea was already formulated in Augustine, De vera religione 32, 19.

  37. The quotations from Maritain refer to the 1927 edition of Art et scolastique, pp. 257, 259, n. 1.

  38. “mens singulare cognoscit per quandam reflexionem, prout, scilicet, mens cognoscendo objectum suum, quod est aliqua natura universalis, redit in cognitionem sui actus, et ulterius in specimen quae est actus sui principium, et ulterius in phantasma a quo species est abstracta; et sic aliquam cognitionem de singulari accipit” (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate X, 5 co., trans. James V. McGlynn, S.J. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer10.htm.

  9

  Toward a History of Denotation

  Denotation (along with its counterpart, connotation) is considered, depending on the context, as either a characteristic or a function (i) of individual terms (what does the word “dog” denote?); (ii) of declarative propositions (the sentence “the dog barks” may denote a state of the world, that there is a dog barking—but, if “the dog” is taken as denoting a species—all dogs, that is—then it could denote a characteristic common to the entire canine race); (iii) of nominal phrases and definite descriptions (the phrase “the President of the Republic” may denote, depending on the context and the circumstances of its utterance, either the actual president currently in power or the role provided for in a constitution). In each of these cases we must decide whether the denotation has to do with the meaning, the referent, or the act of reference. To sum up, by denotation do we mean what is signified by the term, the thing named, or, in the case of propositions, what is the case or what is believed to be the case, inasmuch as it forms the content of a proposition?

  For structural linguists, “denotation” is concerned with meaning. For Hjelmslev (1943) the difference between a denotative semiotic and a connotative semiotic lies in the fact that the former is a semiotic whose expression plane is not a semiotic, whereas the latter is a semiotic whose expression plane is a semiotic. Barthes (1964) too formulates his position basing himself on Hjelmslev and develops a fully intensional idea of denotation, according to which, between a signifier and a first (or zero) degree signified, there is always a denotative relationship.

  In componential analysis, the term has been used to indicate the sense-relationship expressed by a lexical term—such as the term “uncle,” which expresses the relationship “father’s brother” (see, for instance, Leech 1974: 238). In other words, in
structuralist circles, denotation, referring back to Frege’s (1892) distinction, is closer to Sinn than to Bedeutung, closer to meaning than to reference, and in Carnap’s (1955) terms has more to do with intension than with extension.

  It is, however, Frege’s term Bedeutung that is ambiguous, and it should be replaced with Bezeichnung (which we may translate as “designation”), given that, in the vocabulary of philosophy, Bedeutung usually stands for “meaning,” whereas Bezeichnung stands for “reference, designation” and for denotation in the extensional sense. Husserl (1970), for instance, says that a sign signifies or means (bedeutet) a signified and designates (bezeichnet) a thing. This is why, in the most recent tradition of Anglo-Saxon semantics inspired by Frege, Bedeutung is often rendered with “reference” or “denotation” (see, for example, Dummett 1973). And so the usage of the structuralists is completely turned on its head.

  In the field of analytic philosophy, the whole picture underwent a radical change with Russell’s essay “On Denoting” (1905), in which denotation is presented as different from meaning; and this is the direction followed by the entire Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. See, for instance, Ogden and Richards (1923) and Morris (1946), where it is said that when, for example, in Pavlov’s experiment, a dog reacts to the bell, food is the denotatum of the bell, while the condition of being edible is its significatum.

  In this sense, an expression denotes either the individuals or the class of individuals of which it is the name, whereas it connotes the characteristics on the basis of which such individuals are recognized as members of the class in question. If we go on to substitute (see Carnap 1955) the pairing extension/intension for the pairing denotation/connotation, then denotation becomes a function of connotation.