From the Tree to the Labyrinth (17 page)

9
. See Boethius (1998: 33).

10
. And in 157, 15, it is repeated again that a given difference can be predicated of more than one species: “Falsum est quod omnis differentia sequens ponit superiores, quia ubi sunt permixtae differentiae, fallit” (“It is false that every successive difference presupposes those that come before it, for that rule does not hold true in cases where the differences are mixed”).

11
. “In rebus enim sensibilibus etiam ipsae differentiae essentiales ignotae sunt, unde significantur per differentias accidentales, quae ex essentialibus oriuntur, sicut causa significatur per suum effectum, sicut bipes ponitur differentia hominis” (“Even in the case of sensible things we do not know their essential differences; we indicate them through the accidental differences that flow from the essential differences, as we refer to a cause through its effect. In this way ‘biped’ is given as the difference of man”), Aquinas (1983, ch. V, paragraph 6, p. 63).

12
. See for instance the by now regrettably classic examples of Katz and Fodor (1963) or Katz (1972). For these problems, and for further references to the very extensive bibliography on the subject, see Eco (1984a: ch. 2) and Violi (1997 [English trans. Violi 2001]).

13
. For a comprehensive historical survey, see Foucault (1966), Collison (1966), Binkley ed. (1977) (in particular the essay by Fowler), Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli (1981), Cherchi (1990), Schaer (1996), Salsano (1997), and Pombo et al. (2006) (and all Pombo’s contributions on the Internet).

14
.
Enkyklios
does not really mean, as it is usually translated today, “circular” education, in the sense of harmoniously complete, so much as “in the circle.” Aristotle, in his
Nicomachean Ethics
and in the
De coelo
uses the adjective to mean “usual,” “ordinary,” in the meaning of “recurrent.” But, according to some interpreters, the adjective refers to the form of the chorus: learning to sing certain hymns was an essential part of a boy’s education, and therefore
enkyklios
would mean “the kind of education that a boy should have received.” In fact this is the sense in which Vitruvius (
De architectura,
VI) interprets it, as “doctrinarum omnium disciplina,” (“the disciple of all knowledge”) and likewise Quintilian in
Institutio oratoria
(I, 10).

15
. English translation: Rabelais (2006: 48–49).

16
. Cf. West (1997) for the idea suggested in Vives’s
De disciplinis
of the encyclopedia as a constant expansion of information as a result of after-dinner conversation.

17
. “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror” (Horace,
Epistolae
2, 1, 156).

18
. These points will be further developed in
Chapter 3
of the present volume.

19
. Biblical quotes, here and elsewhere, are from the King James Version.

20
. English translation: Curley (1979: 15–16).

21
. If we find this order disconcerting, all we have to do is to consult, let’s say, an Italian elementary school textbook from the 1930s containing scraps of ancient Roman history and the history of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento (skipping from Julius Caesar to Garibaldi), snippets of arts and literature (in the form of portraits of great men of the past), various lessons concerning life on the farm, notions of Fascism, a rudimentary introduction to racism. Anyone approaching such a text today with a scientific mentality would be unable to grasp the logic of its composition, but it contained all that the elementary school teacher was expected to impart as indispensable to the education of a child. Furthermore, if we were to compare the various morning schedules of a modern
liceo
or high school, we would be faced with incomprehensible leaps from organic chemistry to philosophy, from square roots to Petrarch. Or think again of the vagabond structure of many encyclopedias for children.

22
. For the encyclopedic projects of the Renaissance and beyond, see the various contributions of Tega (1983, 1984, 1995, 2000, 2004), Vasoli (1978) and Pombo et al. (2006). For the Theaters of the World, cf. Rossi (1960) and Yates (1966).

23
. A scholar who, in the Baroque period, and precisely in the name of the pansophical ideal, will partially succeed in fleshing out his index is Jan Amos Komensky. With a general reform of society in mind and with an eye to implementing fresh pedagogical forms, in his
Didactica magna
(1628) and
Janua linguarum
(1631), to give the student an immediate visual apprehension of the things he was learning, Komensky attempted to classify the elementary notions according to a logic of ideas (the creation of the world, the four elements, the mineral, vegetable, and animals realms), while in his
Orbis sensualium pictus quadrilinguis
(1658) he devised a detailed illustrated nomenclature of all the world’s fundamental objects as well as of human actions.

24
. Proemium, Epistle Dedicatory, Preface, and Plan of the
Instauratio Magna
by Francis Bacon, in Eliot (1909, vol. 39, p. 126).

25
. The last words of the title
(vere, ut dicitur, muto)
are probably a play on words, since, according to Schott, the author was dumb
(muto),
and in Castilian
Bermudo
is pronounced almost the same as
Ver-mudo
(cf. Ceñal 1946).

26
. Leibniz will discuss the inappropriateness of this arrangement by classes in his early work,
Dissertatio de arte combinatoria
(1666).

27
. Mss. Chigiani I, vi, 225, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; see Marrone (1986).

28
. For the Geometric Finger, see Eco (1996a: 96).

29
. English translation: D’Alembert (1963: 46–49).

30
. English translation: Dante (1982: Paradiso XXXIII: 85–96).

31
. In this labyrinth, by the way, there has to be a Minotaur, just to make the experience interesting, seeing that the pathway through it (setting aside the initial disorientation of Theseus, who doesn’t know where it will lead) always leads where it has to lead and can’t lead anywhere else.

32
. In this case there is no need for a Minotaur; the Minotaur is the visitor himself, misled as to the nature of the tree.

33
. The first proposals for switching to encyclopedic representations are to be found in Wilson (1967). There followed Eco (1975), Haiman (1980), Eco (1984a), Marconi (1992, 1999), and Violi (1997).

34
. This was the topic of the seminar in which
Chapters 2
and
3
in this volume had their origin. Its purpose was to attempt to establish how and to what extent Aristotle’s proposal had been accepted throughout history. For a complete overview reaching down to the present day, see the miscellany edited by Lorusso (2005), in which, for the analysis of the Aristotelian texts, we refer the reader to the contributions of Manetti (2005), Calboli Montefusco (2005), and Calboli (2005).

35
. On the fact that metaphor constructs rather than discovering a similarity and is a source of fresh knowledge, not so much because it makes us know a given thing better but above all because it makes us discover a new way of organizing things, see, in addition to Black, Ricoeur (1975: 246) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 215).

36
. It will be observed how this reconstruction of a fragment of encyclopedia within Joyce’s text was reminiscent of the model in Quillian (1968), adopted in Eco (1975).

37
. Pavel (1986: 64–70).

38
. On the
Metrôon
as a warehouse of memory, see Esposito (2001: 107–110).

39
. It has been suggested that the concept of a semiotic encyclopedia corresponds to Lotman’s idea of the semiosphere: “Imagine a room in a museum, where exhibits from different eras are laid out in different windows, with texts in known and unknown languages, and instructions for deciphering them, together with explanatory texts for the exhibitions created by guides who map the necessary routes and rules of behaviour for visitors. If we place into that room still more visitors, with their own semiotic worlds, then we will begin to obtain some thing resembling a picture of the semiosphere” (Lotman 2005: 213–214). In point of fact Lotman’s semiosphere would appear on the one hand to be still vaster than a Maximal Encyclopedia because it also contains the private and idiosyncratic notions of the individual visitors; on the other hand, it is, so to speak, regulated by someone (the organizers) and therefore appears rather to be the territory of a culture that has set up rules to distinguish a Median Encyclopedia from the Specialized Encyclopedias.

40
. [
Translator’s note:
On Gesualdo, among others, see Barbara Keller-Dall’Asta,
Heilsplan und Gedächtnis: zur Mnemologie des 16. Jahrhunderts in Italien
(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2001).]

41
. The work of Johannes Spangenberg appeared under this title in 1570, but another version with the title
Libellus de comparatione artificiosae memoriae
had appeared in 1539. It would be subsequently published as
Artis memoriae seu potius reminiscentiae
in 1603,
Ars memoriae
in 1614, etc.

42
. To these causes we might add the mystics’ techniques for detachment from the world and from one’s own memories. These are certainly techniques that aim at voluntary forgetfulness, but what is to be forgotten is so global as to coincide with the annihilation of one’s own self-awareness. This being the case, I would prefer to speak of spiritual ablation, not of a technique for canceling local portions of our memory.

43
. [
Translator’s note:
A fundamental strategy in the art of memory consisted in collocating mnemonic images or figures in a series of designated “places” along a familiar route that the orator would follow with his mind’s eye observing the images to be remembered. The art of forgetting consists, then, in eliminating these “places” or reminders. See, for example, Yates (1966) and Eco and Migiel (1988).]

44
. [
Translator’s note:
My translation from Eco’s text (AO)].

45
. Note that we cannot make an exception either for the most blatant cases of political censure—such as the photographs of the Stalinist period in which the images of the former leaders declared to be heretics and shot have been removed—precisely because that act of violence kept the memory of those eliminated alive in the collective memory. Similarly, the various attempts at revisionism, such as the theory that Kennedy’s death did not occur as the official records have it, because—as we will see later—in cases that involve the (presumed) correction of an error or a debate over two possible solutions to a problem, the tendency is to retain, not just the solution assumed to be correct, but both horns of the dilemma.

46
. When, in the
Rhetorica ad Herennium
(III, xx, 33), to remember the idea of witnesses
(testes),
the orator is urged to imagine a goat’s testicles
(testes),
what we have is an etymological association. When, in the same work (III, xxi, 33), to recall the line of verse, “Iam domum itionem reges Atridae parant” (“And now the kings, sons of Atreus, prepare their return home”), a complex image is conjured up to evoke the families of the Domitii and the Reges (a purely phonetic association), as well as a still more complex image of actors preparing for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus, which plays on the one hand on genealogical memories and on the other on semantic analogies—we do not have the impression that any systematic criterion is involved, indeed we are even entitled to wonder whether what we are presented with is really a useful mnemotechnical device, seeing that in any case the author also advises his reader to learn the line by heart.

47
. “Ne mireris, quod quae pro locis supra posuimus, pro figuris nunc apta esse dicamus. Loca enim praedicta pro figuris (secundum diversos respectos) servire poterunt” (“You should not be surprised if we now say that what earlier we posited for the loci is also true for the figures. For the loci previously described could serve [according to various aspects] as figures,”
Thesaurus,
p. 78).

48
. This is why the logical discussions concerning existential presuppositions, or on the truth value to be assigned to the assertion
Yesterday Piero met his sister
if we could truthfully assert that Piero has no sisters, appear ingenuous and lacking in common sense. It is in fact unlikely that someone will respond to the first assertion with
Your assertion does not make sense because Piero has no sisters.
It is highly likely that the answers will be: (i) Whose sister? (presumption of error in the identification of the individual); (ii) You must have been dreaming (reference to existence in a possible world); (iii) Just what do you mean by sister? (presumption of lexical error); I didn’t know Piero had any sisters (correction of one’s previous conviction). This occurs because every assertion, rather than presupposing,
posits,
makes present in the universe of discourse, by its semiotic power, the entities it names, albeit as entities in a possible world (cf. Eco and Violi 1987).

49
. In Canetti’s
Auto-da-fé
Professor Kien, endowed with a prodigious memory, records in a notebook all the idiocies he is trying to forget—an ironical narrative invention if ever there was one.

50
. There exist casual mechanisms by which an idea or expression is not forgotten but confused instead with other ideas or expressions. In such cases confusion can occur both between expressions (confusion by pseudo-synomymity, such as mixing up the terms
paronomasia
and
antonomasia
), or between an expression and two different meanings, say, or notions or definitional contents (like not remembering whether
fragola
in Italian means “strawberry” or “raspberry”). Both of these phenomena never occur by subtraction (something is there that subsequently disappears), but by addition (two notions or terms become superimposed in your memory and you no longer know which one is correct). The phenomenon usually occurs the first time we make a mistake; someone gives us the correct information; and from then on we remember the error and the correction together, without recalling which is which. The dilemma left a more lasting impression than its solution, and it is the former and not the latter that stayed in our mind. The same thing often happens with the pronunciation of a word in a foreign language. There are no voluntary devices for forgetting, but they do exist for not remembering properly: you must multiply the semiosis. We may try to forget the medieval mnemonic rhyme invented to remember the moods of the first syllogistic figure (Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio) by training ourselves to repeat over and over for several days a corrupted version “Birbiri, Celirant, Doria, Fario,” until we are no longer able to recall which of the two formulas is the correct one. We do not forget by cancelation but by superposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying the presences.