From the Tree to the Labyrinth (82 page)

[
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 without 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.

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.”

To speak of what
is
signifies making communicable what we know about it. But to know it, and communicate it, implies appealing to the generic, which is already an effect of semiosis, and depends on a segmentation of the content of which Kant’s system of categories, anchored to a venerable philosophical tradition, is itself a cultural product already established, culturally rooted, and linguistically fixed. When the manifold of the intuition is referred to the unity of the concept, the
percipienda
are by now already perceived just as culture has taught us to speak of them.
²

Yet if a semiosic foundation is implied by the general framework of Kantian doctrine, that is one thing; it is entirely another question whether Kant ever developed a theory of how we assign names to the things we perceive, whether they be trees, dogs, stones, or horses. Given the question “How do we assign names to things?,” as Kant had inherited the problem of a theory of knowledge, the responses were essentially two. One came from the tradition that we may call “Scholastic” (but which begins with Plato and Aristotle): things present themselves to the world already ontologically defined in their essence, matter organized by a form. It is not important to decide whether this (universal) form is
ante rem
or
in re:
it is offered to us, it shines in the individual substance, it is grasped by the intellect, it is thought and defined (and therefore
named
) as a quiddity. Our mind has no work to do, or only insofar as the agent intellect does, which (wherever it may work) does so in a flash.

The second response was that of British empiricism. We know nothing of substances, and even if they existed, they would reveal nothing to us. For Locke, what we have are sensations, which propose simple ideas to us, either primary or secondary, but still unconnected: a rhapsody of weights, measures, sizes, and then colors, sounds, flavors, reflections changing with the hours of the day and the conditions of the subject. Here the intellect acts, in the sense that it
works:
it combines, correlates, and abstracts, in a way that is certainly spontaneous and natural to it, but only thus does it coordinate simple ideas to form those complex ideas to which we give the name of man, horse, tree, and then again, triangle, beauty, cause and effect. To know is to give names to these compositions of simple ideas. For Hume, the work of the intellect, as regards the recognition of things, is even simpler (we work directly on impressions of which ideas are faded images): the problem arises, if anything, in positing relations between ideas of things, as occurs in affirmations of causality. Here we would say that there is work, but performed without effort, by dint of habit and a natural disposition toward belief, even if we are required to consider the contiguity, priority, or constancy in the succession of our impressions.

Kant certainly does not believe that the Scholastic solution can be proposed again. Indeed, if there is truly a Copernican aspect to his revolution, it lies in the fact that he suspends all judgment on form
in re
and assigns a productive-synthetic, and not merely abstractive, function to the traditional agent intellect. As for the English empiricists, Kant seeks a transcendental foundation for the process they accepted as a reasonable way of moving in the world, whose legality was confirmed by the very fact that, when all was said and done, it worked.

At the same time, however, Kant noticeably shifts the focus of interest for a theory of knowledge. It is rash to say, as Heidegger (1997) did, that the
Critique of Pure Reason
has nothing to do with a theory of knowledge but is rather a questioning by ontology of its intrinsic possibility. Yet, it is also true, to quote Heidegger again, that it has little to do with a theory of ontic knowledge, in other words, of experience.

Nevertheless, Kant believed in the evidence of phenomena, he believed that our sensible intuitions came from somewhere, and he was concerned to articulate a rebuttal of idealism. But it appears to have been Hume who roused Kant from his dogmatic sleep, problematizing the causal relationship between things, and not Locke, though it was Locke who brought to the table the problem of an activity of the intellect in the naming of things.

A fundamental problem for the empiricists was saying why we decide, upon receiving sensible impressions from something, whether they refer to a tree or a stone. Yet it seems to have become a secondary problem for Kant, who was too preoccupied with guaranteeing our knowledge of heavenly mechanics.

In fact, the first
Critique
does not construct a gnoseology so much as an epistemology. As Rorty (1979) sums it up, Kant wasn’t interested in
knowledge of
but in
knowledge that:
not, then, in the conditions of knowledge (and therefore the naming) of objects. Kant asked himself how pure mathematics and physics are possible, or how it is possible to make mathematics and physics two theoretical fields of knowledge that must determine their objects a priori. The nucleus of the first
Critique
concerns the search to provide philosophical warrant for a legislation of the intellect regarding those
propositions
that have their model in Newton’s laws—and that, out of the need for exemplification, are sometimes illustrated by more comprehensible and venerable propositions such as
All bodies are heavy.
Kant is concerned to guarantee the knowledge of those laws fundamental to nature, understood as
the totality of objects of experience.
But he appears uninterested (at least until his
Critique of Judgment
) in clarifying how we know the objects of daily experience, what nowadays we call
natural kinds,
for example, camel, beech tree, beetle—with which the empiricists, on the other hand, were concerned.