From the Tree to the Labyrinth (5 page)

In the face of these criticisms, since the middle of the twentieth century, the conviction has made more and more headway, especially among the theorists of cognitivist semantics, that linguistic competence is always encyclopedic, and that in semantic representation no distinction can be made (except on a provisional basis and for the purpose of specific analyses) between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world.

But at this point we must abandon the vicissitudes of the dictionary to trace the historical evolution of the encyclopedia.

The role of the encyclopedia has fluctuated over the centuries.
¹³
The word “encyclopedia” comes from
enkyklios paideia,
which signified a complete education in the Greek tradition.
¹⁴
The term “encyclopedia,” however, makes its first appearance in the sixteenth century, first in a different form in Fleming Joachim Stergk’s
Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kuklopaideia
(1529), and then in
The Boke Named The Governor
(1531) by Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in chapter XIII, on some reasons for the decline of education among English gentlemen, cites the encyclopedia as the sum total of knowledge, or the “world of science,” or “the circle of doctrine.” This same sum total of knowledge as a complete education is recommended by Gargantua to his son in book II, chapter 8 of Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel
(1532):

That is why, my son, I urge you to employ your youth in making good progress in study [and virtue]. You are in Paris; Epistemon your tutor is with you; both can teach you: one directly and orally, the other by laudable examples.

I intend and will that you acquire a perfect command of languages—first Greek (as Quintilian wishes), secondly Latin, and then Hebrew for the Holy Scriptures, as well as Chaldaean and Arabic likewise—and that, for your Greek, you mould your style by imitating Plato, and for your Latin, Cicero.

Let there be no history which you do not hold ready in memory: to help you, you have the cosmographies of those who have written on the subject.

When you were still very young—about five or six—I gave you a foretaste of geometry, arithmetic and music among the liberal arts. Follow that up with the other arts. Know all the canons of astronomy, but leave judicial astrology and the Art of Lullius alone as abuses and vanities.

I want you to learn all of the beautiful texts of Civil Law by heart and compare them to moral philosophy.

And as for the knowledge of natural phenomena, I want you to apply yourself to it with curiosity: let there be no sea, river or stream the fishes of which you do not know. Know all the birds of the air, all the trees, bushes and shrubs of the forests, all the herbs in the soil, all the metals hidden deep in the womb of the Earth, the precious stones of all the Orient and the South: let none remain unknown to you.

Then frequent the books of the ancient medical writers, Greek, Arabic and Latin, without despising the Talmudists or the Cabbalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of that other world which is Man.

And for a few hours every day start to study the Sacred Writings: first the Gospels and Epistles of the Apostles in Greek, then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me see you an abyss of erudition.
¹⁵

In book II, chapter 20, Thaumastes praises the young Pantagruel’s culture, saying: “I swear he discovered, for my benefit, the true source, well and abyss of the encyclopedia of learning.”

In 1536 we find the term in Juan Luis Vives’s
De disciplinis,
in which he calls “encyclopedia” the various things that the educand must know, with explicit reference to Pliny and other classical encyclopedists.
¹⁶
As part of the title of a book the word appears in Paulus Scalichius de Lika’s
Encyclopediae seu orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam profanarum epistemon
(Basel, 1559).

No Greek encyclopedias, at least in the sense of compilations of previous knowledge, have survived. Of course, the works of Aristotle are an encyclopedia, ranging as they do from logic to astronomy and from the study of animals to human psychology. They are not presented, however, as a collection of shared knowledge, but as a fresh offering. Likewise, in a Latin context, rather than an encyclopedic collection of facts, Lucretius’s
De rerum natura
aspires to be a systematic exposition of “scientific” truths.

The works that have been seen as examples of Greek encyclopedism are instead expressions, frequently incidental, of curiosity and wonder over fabulous lands and peoples: in this sense an encyclopedic component has been identified in the
Odyssey.
Encyclopedic interests are definitely present in Herodotus when he describes the marvels of Egypt and of other barbaric peoples. The Greek
Alexander Romance,
though its actual date is uncertain and its attribution to Callisthenes, a contemporary of Alexander, apocryphal, was probably composed at the beginning of the Hellenistic period and, while claiming to narrate the adventures of the famous Macedonian condottiere, presents itself in fact as a travel guide to marvelous places teeming with extraordinary creatures.

It was the mature Alexandrian period that produced many works of
paradoxography,
devoted to the presentation of remarkable things and events, such as the treatise devoted by Strato of Lampsacus to unusual animals, the
Mirabilia
of Callimachus, or that of Antigonus of Carystus, while the
De mirabilibus auscultationibus,
an assemblage or miscellany of little-known facts in the fields of botany, mineralogy, zoology, hydrography, and mythology, once attributed to Aristotle, can be assigned to Hellenistic circles of the third century
B.C.
Finally, we may speak of specialized encyclopedias in the case of later geographical compendia such as Pomponius Mela’s
De situ orbis
(first century
A.D.
), Aelian’s
De natura animalium
(second / third century) or the
Lives of the Philosophers
by Diogenes Laertius (second / third century).

But there is a line between the compendia of curious facts and erudite digressions (like the
Noctes Atticae,
composed by Aulus Gellius in the second century
A.D.
, or specialized encyclopedias such as Pomponius Mela’s) and an encyclopedia
in the global and organic sense of the word,
a work that aspires in other words to be an exhaustive catalogue of existing knowledge.

The Hellenistic world assigned the role that Roman and medieval scholars would eventually assign to the encyclopedia, not to a single volume that deals with everything, but to a collection of all existing volumes, the
library,
as well as to a collection of all
things
possible, the
museum.
The museum and library built in Alexandria by Ptolemy I (said to have held, depending on the period, between 500,000 and 700,000 volumes) formed the nucleus of a veritable university, a center for the collection, research, and transmission of knowledge.

The encyclopedic attitude took shape instead in Roman circles, in which the whole of Greek knowledge was gathered together, in a labor of appropriation of the patrimony of that
Graecia capta
which
ferum victorem cepit.
¹⁷
An early example is the
Rerum divinarum et humanarum antiquitates
of Terentius Varro (first century
B.C.
), of which only fragments have survived, which dealt with history, grammar, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, agriculture, law, rhetoric, the arts, literature, the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, the history of the gods. We do possess, however, the 37 books of Pliny the Elder’s
Historia Naturalis
(first century
A.D.
, approximately 20,000 facts cited and 500 authors consulted), devoted to the heavens and the universe in general, the various countries of the world, prodigious births and burials, the earth’s fauna, creatures of the deep, birds, insects, vegetables, medicines derived from vegetable and animal sources, metals, painting, precious stones and gems.

At first sight, Pliny’s work appears to be a mere confused jumble of facts, with no structure, but, if we turn our attention to the immense index, we realize that the work begins in fact with the heavens, going on to deal with geography, demography, and ethnography, followed by anthropology and human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, gardening, natural pharmacology, medicine, and magic, before proceeding to mineralogy, architecture, and the plastic arts—setting up a sort of hierarchy proceeding from the original to the derivative, from the natural to the artificial—according to the arborescent structure illustrated in
Figure 1.11
.

Figure 1.11

This aspect should also be borne in mind for what we will have to say about subsequent encyclopedias. An encyclopedia always relies for its organization on a tree—whose model is invariably, on a more or less conscious level, that of the binary subdivision of a Porphyrian tree. But the difference between the
Arbor Porphyriana
and the encyclopedic tree (which amounts, openly or in a dissimulated fashion, to a table of contents) is that the Porphyrian tree claims to use the terms of its disjunctions as primitives, not susceptible of further definition, and at the same time indispensable for defining something else, while in the encyclopedic index each node is referred to the notions that define it and will be presented in the course of the overall discussion. And in this sense classifications like those of the natural sciences also have or can assume the role of an index.

This difference is fundamental to an understanding of the history of encyclopedias and their indices. For a long time the encyclopedist used his index as a working tool that was basically
not
supposed to be of interest to the reader, whose need instead was for the information the encyclopedia contained—in other words, the encyclopedist was concerned with
where
he was going to put the crocodile, but he believed in principle that what the reader was interested in were the crocodile’s empirical properties, not its place in the classification. Instead, this point of view gradually changed in the case of many modern encyclopedias, whose primary aim was precisely to provide a model of the organization of knowledge. It was some time, however, before the “plan” of an encyclopedia began to constitute an object of reflection or of meta-encyclopedic comment. For the reader, the encyclopedia appeared as a “map” of different territories whose edges were jagged and often imprecise, so that one had the impression of moving through it as if it were a labyrinth that allowed one to choose paths that were constantly new, without feeling obliged to stick to a route leading from the general to the particular.

The second aspect of how Pliny lays out a model for encyclopedias to come is that he does not speak of things he knows from experience but of things handed down to him by tradition, and he does not make the slightest effort to separate reliable empirical information from legend (he gives equal space to the crocodile and the basilisk). This point is extremely important in defining the encyclopedia as a theoretical model:
the encyclopedia does not claim to register what really exists but what people traditionally believe exists—and hence everything that an educated person should know, not simply to have knowledge of the world, but also to understand discourses about the world.

This characteristic is already evident in the Hellenistic encyclopedias (a great many paragraphs in the pseudo-Aristotelian
De mirabilibus,
for example, employ a
verbum dicendi
such as “they say that” or “the story goes that” or “it is said that”), and it will remain a constant in medieval encyclopedias, as well as in those of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Foucault reminds us that Buffon was astonished that in a sixteenth-century naturalist like Aldrovandi there was “an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, quotations from other authors, fables relayed uncritically, observations which dealt indiscriminately with the anatomy, habitat, and mythological properties of an animal, and the uses that could be made of it in medicine or in magic.” In fact, as Foucault goes on to comment:

When one goes back to take a look at the
Historia serpentum et draconum,
one finds the chapter “On the serpent in general” arranged under the following headings: equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds caused by the serpent, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, epithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries, hieroglyphics, emblems and symbols, proverbs, coinage, miracles, riddles, devices, heraldic signs, historical facts, dreams, simulacra and statues, use in human diet, use in medicine, miscellaneous uses. Whereupon Buffon comments: “Let it be judged after that what proportion of natural history is to be found in such a hotch-potch of writing. There is no description here, only legend.” And indeed, for Aldrovandi and his contemporaries, it was all legenda—things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms. When one is faced with the task of writing an animal’s history, it is useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of compiler: one has to collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets. (Foucault 1970: 38–39)