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

by Umberto Eco

  The point is that, if language must be considered the only way to enter into a rapport with the Sacred, every etymology must be “good”; in every metaphor, even the most banal, there should shine a truth, even in screwdriver. Since rue passante is not ancient to belong to the golden age, in recognizing it as an undegenerate expression Maistre is simply privileging the freshness of popular language over that of bureaucratic language. If he were to trace these and other discriminants, he would shift from mystical linguistics to sociolinguistics, an intention that is very far from his mind.

  In fact, he returns constantly to the idea that the perfect language is that of the origins:

  The formation of the most perfect, the most meaningful, the most philosophic words, in the full force of the term, invariably belongs to the time of ignorance and simplicity. One must add, to complete this great theory, that similarly the name-making talent invariably disappears in the measure that one descends to the epochs of civilization and science. In all the writings of our time on this interesting question, there has been a continuously expressed wish for a philosophic language, but without anyone knowing or even suspecting that the most philosophic language is that in which philosophy is least involved. Two little things are lacking to philosophy to create words: the intelligence to invent them and the power to get them adopted. If it sees a new object, it pages through its dictionaries to find an antique or foreign word, and almost always it turns out badly. The word montgolfière, for example, which is national, is correct, at least in one sense, and I prefer it to aréostat, which is the scientific term and which says nothing. One might as well call a ship a hydrostat. See this crowd of new words borrowed from the Greek this past twenty years, as crime or folly has found the need: almost all have been taken or formed in a way that is contrary to their literal meaning. The word théophilanthrope, for example, is more foolish than the thing, which is to say a lot: an English or German schoolboy would have known how to say, on the contrary, théanthrophile. You tell me that this word was invented by wretches in a wretched period; but chemical nomenclature, which was certainly the work of very enlightened men, begins with a solecism of the worst sort, oxygène instead of oxygone. Moreover, although I am not a chemist, I have excellent reasons to think that this whole dictionary will be effaced; but merely looking at the matter from the philological and grammatical point of view, it would be perhaps the most unfortunate thing imaginable if the recently disputed metric nomenclature did not win the all-time award for barbarism. (56–57)

  Why should oxygen be more unhappy than the very unhappy oxygon? This is what Maistre does not explain. If language is seen as what the world was for the Middle Ages, as a natural revelation of Truth, nothing in language should be wrong. As medieval thinkers said, even monsters should show the power of God. Furthermore, as Maistre is the first to assert, in language there is a glottogonic force that overcomes all human resistance (and hence language is always right).

  It must, however, be said that, at least in one case, Maistre’s reasoning finds a logically plausible formulation. He seeks, in effect, to distinguish three concepts: (1) the historical paternity through which every language derives from another, all tracing their ancestry back to the same, primigenial source; (2) the autonomous force whereby every language develops its own genius, and (3) the presence within each language of a “superlinguistic” force, a sort of divinely bestowed energheia that causes, within each language, without necessarily any historical descendance or borrowing, the same miracle of the primordial language to take place. Thus the following passage becomes comprehensible, as it denies thesis 1 in the first paragraph and affirms thesis 2 in the second:

  And what can we say of the surprising analogies that can be noticed between languages separated by time and space to the point of never having been able to influence each other?

  1. Please notice that I am not to be understood to be speaking of simple conformities of words acquired simply by way of contact or communication;

  2. I speak only of conformities of ideas, proved by synonyms of sense, totally different in form, which excludes all idea of borrowing. I will only have you notice one very singular thing, which is that when it is a question of rendering some of those ideas whose natural expression would in some way offend delicacy, the French often chanced upon the same turns of phrase formerly employed by the Greeks in their day to save these shocking naïvetés, that must appear quite extraordinary since in this regard we acted on our own without asking anything of our intermediaries, the Latins. (52, my emphasis)

  But after the assertion that every language resolves its own problems by itself, thesis 3 emerges, which sets out to prove that it is no longer a language’s autonomy but rather the existence of an original and divine force, the word, that becomes the source of every language.

  If, on this point of the origin of language, as on so many others, our century has missed the truth, it is because it has a mortal fear of meeting it. Languages began, but the word never, and not even with man. The one has necessarily preceded the other, since the word is possible only through the VERB [i.e., the Word of God]. Every particular language comes into being like an animal, by birth and development, so that man never passed from a state of voicelessness to the use of the word. He has always spoken, and it is with sublime reason that the Hebrews called him a TALKING SOUL. (54)

  But then, immediately afterward, and without a break, thesis 1, rejected in the first paragraph, is reproposed:

  When a new language takes form, it is born in the midst of a society that is in the full possession of language; and the action or the principle that presides at this formation cannot arbitrarily invent one word. It uses those it finds around it or that it calls from farther away; it nourishes itself on them, it chews them, it digests them, and it never adopts them without modifying them to some degree. (54, my emphasis)

  Finally, to underline the (always good) naturalness with which each single language, grinding or digesting previous elements, forms always suitable words, there is a gloss: “In a century passionate for every gross expression excluding order and intelligence, they have talked a lot about arbitrary symbols; but there are no arbitrary symbols, every word having its reason” (54). This negates what was previously asserted, namely, that having invented oxygen was a sign of degeneration. In fact, Maistre is biased: he thinks (from the beginning) that the modern inventors of oxygen were degenerate (inasmuch as they were modern), while the ancient inventors of cadaver were right (inasmuch as they were ancient). He is not seized by the suspicion that not even the ancient inventors of cadaver were the original Name Giver.

  However, we also accept the proposition according to which languages live on borrowings; they transform and adapt, and yet their every word is natural and motivated. If Maistre returned to his example of rue passante, he would find that there is a motivation for the compound, but he would not be able to explain the motivation of rue and of passer, unless he repeated all the contortions of the classic etymologists. Thus, arriving at the crucial point, he gives up. Or, rather, he probably believes that he is not giving up, if the following passage is the expected demonstration. But the total mutual contradiction of the provided examples forces us—in the interest of the reader—to mark within the passage the various theses (all in disagreement among themselves) that it demonstrates. In our view, the theses are the following:

  1. Thesis of obscure borrowing. Sometimes in a language there existed a word that then somehow passed into another language, which abandoned it but passed it on to a local dialect; for this reason, we may find in an Alpine locality a word used today in the Slavic area. This thesis, however, does not explain why words must reflect the nature of things, nor does it say that they do reflect it.

  2. Thesis of autonomous invention. Sometimes a word is invented by analogy with a foreign term, sometimes by metaphor. Then each language invents its own terms and does so following quite different criteria.

  3. Thesis of original iconism. A langu
age does not invent words; it finds them already made, in accord with nature. (No proofs follow.)

  4. Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing. One language borrows words from different languages, for the widest variety of reasons.

  This is how, without a break, four mutually incompatible theses are affirmed.

  [Thesis of obscure borrowing] Perhaps you will remember that in that country French son (in Latin furfur) is called Bren. On the other side of the Alps an owl is called Sava. If someone were to ask you why the two peoples have chosen these two arrangements of sound to express these two ideas, you would have been tempted to reply: Because they judged it appropriate; things of this sort are arbitrary. However you would have been in error; for the first of those two words is English and the second is Slavic; and from Ragusa to Kamchatka the word is used to signify in the beautiful Russian language what it signifies eight hundred leagues from here in a purely local dialect. You will not be tempted, I hope, to tell me that men deliberating on the Thames, on the Rhine, on the Obi, or on the Po, would by chance come across the same sounds to express the same ideas. Therefore the two words already pre-existed in the two languages that presented them to the two dialects. Would you like to think that the four peoples received them from some previous people? I know nothing of it, but I admit, it: in the first place it is the consequence of the fact that these two immense families, the Teutonic and the Slavic, did not arbitrarily invent these two words, but that they received them. Then the question begins again with respect to earlier nations. Where did they get them? One must answer in the same way, they received them; and so one goes back to the origin of things. (54–55)

  [Thesis of autonomous invention] The candles that are being carried in at the moment remind me of their name: at one time the French carried on a great commerce with the city of Botzia in the Kingdom of Fez; they brought from there a great quantity of wax candles that they took to naming botzies. Soon the national genius shaped this word and made bougies of it. The English retained the old expression wax-candle, and the Germans prefer to say wachslicht (light of wax); but everywhere you see the cause that determined the word. Even if I had not run across the etymology of bougie in the preface of Thomassin’s Hebrew dictionary, where I certainly would never have looked for it, would I have been less sure of some such etymology? To be in doubt on such a matter, one would have to extinguish the flame of analogy, which is to say one would have to renounce reasoning. (55)

  [Thesis of original iconism] Notice, if you will, that the very word etymology is already a great proof of the prodigious talent of antiquity to run across or adopt the most perfect words, for it presupposes that each word is true, which is to say that it is not imagined arbitrarily—which is enough to lead a good mind a long way. Because of induction, what one knows in this genre demonstrates a great deal about other cases. What one does not know, on the contrary, proves nothing except the ignorance of the one who is looking. An arbitrary sound never expresses and can never express an idea. As thought necessarily exists prior to words, which are only the physical symbols of thought, words, in their turn, exist prior to the formation of every new language, which receives them ready-made and then modifies them to its own taste. Like an animal, the genius of each language hunts every source to find what suits it. (55–56)

  [Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing] In our language, for example, maison is Celtic, palais is Latin, basilique is Greek, honnir is Teutonic, rabot is Slavic, almanach is Arab, and sopha is Hebrew. Where does all this take us? It matters little to me, at least at the moment: it suffices for me to prove to you that languages are only formed from other languages, which they usually kill to nourish themselves, in the manner of carnivorous animals. (56)

  The passage concludes: “So let us never speak of chance or of arbitrary symbols” (56). 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 does all this take us?” 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.

  Or, if you would like me to employ another turn of phrase, the word is eternal, and every language is as old as the people who speak it. Some, without reflection, might object that there is no nation that can understand its ancient language—but what, I ask you, does it matter? Do alterations that do not touch principle exclude identity? Would someone who had seen me in my cradle recognize me today? However I think I have the right to say that I am the same. It is no different with language: it is the same as long as the people is the same. The poverty of languages in their beginnings is another assumption made with the full power and authority of philosophy. New words prove nothing, since in the measure that they are acquired others are lost, in who knows what proportions. What is sure is that people have always spoken and they have spoken precisely as they have thought and as well as they have thought, for it is equal foolishness to believe that there is a symbol for a thought that does not exist as to imagine that a thought exists without a symbol to express it. (57–58)

  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” (56) 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.

  This translation is a minimally revised version of the translation by William Weaver that appeared in Eco (1998b). The quotations are here given in the version contained in “The Saint Petersburg Dialogues” in Lebrun (1993).

  13

  On the Silence of Kant

  Paragraph II.4 of linguist Tullio De Mauro’s Introduzione alla semantica (“Introduction to Semantics”) is entitled “Il silenzio di Kant” (“The Silence of Kant”) and clearly alludes (given the context) to Kant’s silence regarding the problem of language. Since then, much has been written on the subject of Kantian semiotics (we have only to think, in Italian, of the contributions of Emilio Garroni). But did De Mauro’s title really exclude Kant from a history of linguistics, if not semiotics? If Kant was (putatively) silent on the issue, not so De Mauro, who immediately went on to point out two crucial passages in which Kant had posed the problem of meaning, perhaps withou
t being fully aware of what he was doing. One was the section in the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled Analytic of Principles, where the German philosopher speaks of the schema, and the other was paragraph 59 of the Critique of Judgment.1 We will have occasion to come back to both of them, but let us first consider De Mauro’s comments on the passage concerning the schema:

  What can this mysterious technique be if not the ability to connect signs of generic value with single images and concepts? We may ask ourselves whether it is possible for Kant not to have been aware that this is precisely the essential function performed by language in Locke and Berkeley’s system, especially when the expressions and examples he uses coincide with those adopted by Locke and Berkeley with reference to the meaning of words. (De Mauro 1965: 65)

  We can only confirm our agreement and attempt to develop a few suggestions of our own.

  13.1. Empirical Concepts

  In Kant the semiotic problem has the right of citizenship, for him as much as it did for Aristotle, if we consider the purely verbal origins of his categorial apparatus (based, in the last analysis, on the structures of their respective languages). In the work he devoted to Kant, Heidegger (1997: 19) remarked: “Finite, intuiting creatures must be able to share in the specific intuition of beings. First of all, however, finite intuition as intuition always remains bound to the specifically intuited particulars. The intuited is only a known being if everyone can make it understandable to oneself and to others and can thereby communicate it.”