From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation by Umberto Eco
Not unmindful of Augustine’s provocation, enter at this point Roger Bacon. The classification of signs outlined in Bacon’s De signis strikes us in many ways as syncretistic and as yet unresolved. The eccentricities of this classification find their explanation in a project whose results will be seen in later semiotics, especially in Ockham. Briefly, up until Bacon, thanks to the Aristotelian vulgate, words signify the passions of the soul (concepts, universal species), species bear an iconic relationship to things, and words, through the mediation of species, serve to name things (nominantur singularia, sed universalia significantur, “they name individual things while they signify universals”). With the De signis, on the other hand, words begin to signify directly individual things, of which the species intelligibiles are the mental counterpart. But the link between words and species becomes secondary and is reduced to a purely symptomatic relationship. Bacon has grasped the difference between symbola and semeia in De interpretatione 16a but, on the basis of a philologically correct reading, he elaborates a philosophically unfaithful reading. In other words, he erases the fact that for Aristotle words may be symptoms of the passions of the mind, but in the first instance they signify them directly, and he concludes that words are symptoms of the species that are formed in the mind.45 We have endeavored to reconstruct Bacon’s classification in Figure 4.8.
In commenting on this figure, let us say at once that that the “natural signs” ought to correspond to those of Augustine, which are produced without any intention, but it is unclear on what grounds Bacon distinguishes between those of the first and those of the third type. It would appear that, whereas in the third type we have a clear relationship of cause and effect, in those of the first type we have simply a relationship of concomitance among events (in the case of those classified as necessary the concomitance is certain, while for the probable ones it is uncertain). But it remains obscure why the ground being wet as a probable sign of a previous rain shower is not classified among the vestigia. Still more embarrassing is the curious collocation of the imagines (intentionally produced by man) among the natural signs. Bacon explains this with the fact that what is made intentionally is the object (the statue), while the resemblance between the statue and the real person is due to a certain homology between the form of the signans and that of the signatum.46 What interests us more is the classification of the signs produced by an intention of the soul, where Bacon perceives an intention even in the case of sounds emitted instinctively, without any intervention on the part of reason or even will, as an immediate movement of the sensitive soul (such as the moaning of the sick and animal noises).
Figure 4.8
Now, the signs ordered by the soul, but without rational deliberation or election of the will, are said to function naturaliter. They have, however, nothing to do with the natural signs. The latter were called natural with reference to nature as substance; the former are called natural because they are set in motion by a movement of nature. Be that as it may, the distinction is clear: the signa naturalia do not appear as the consequence of an intention, on the part of either humans or animals, while the moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog have their origin in a movement of the sensitive soul that tends to express what the animal (human or no) is feeling. And so in this classification the barking of the dog, without being placed alongside Holy Scripture and separated from the mourning of the dove, as it was in Augustine, is not a mere symptom either.
Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that the crow of the rooster appears twice in this classification. There is a cockcrow that is a sign of what time of day it is and a cockcrow that is instead a linguistic act, even if we do not happen to understand its purport.
When Bacon compares these two cases he uses a different terminology. When the cockcrow appears among the signs ordinata ab anima, it is referred to as “cantus galli,” while when it appears as a symptom it is referred to as “gallum cantare”: “cantus galli nichil proprie nobis significat tamquam vox significativa, sed gallum cantare significant nobis horas.” The natural sign is not the cockcrow itself, but the fact that the cock crows (the Stoics would have called it an incorporeal). Now, in the De signis, whom the cock is crowing to (whether to other cocks or to humans) is not specified, but the same theme is picked up again in the Sumulae Dialectices.47
Here Bacon is quite clear: a significant vox is the one by which any animal can communicate with another animal of the same species, in other words there are voces significativae naturaliter that all members of a species understand, and others (the ones that are ad placitum) that are understood only by subgroups of the same human species, as is the case with articulate languages. That animals understand each other can be seen from their behavior, as when, for example, the mother hen warns her chicks of the threat of the hawk. So the rooster speaks with different words according to the circumstances and is understood by the other members of his species, just as the ass is understood by the ass and the lion by the lion. All humans need is a little training, and they too will be able to understand the language of the beasts. As will be further clarified by Pseudo-Marsilius of Inghen:48 the dog certainly barks in order to signify something, and it is irrelevant whether everyone understands what he means, it is enough that those who understand the characteristics and habits of dogs understand.
This said, the table of zoosemiotic situations has been fully explored: the dog who speaks to the dog, the dog whose bark man interprets because he knows the dog’s habits and therefore his language, and even the animal who speaks human words, like the magpie or the parrot (but this is a case of learned behavior and mechanical execution on the animal’s part, and the problem has nothing to do with a theory of signs).49
With Bacon’s espousal of the zoosemiotic revaluation of an Augustine who is closer to Greek culture, the barking dog definitively joins the ranks of those who, in one way or another, express themselves, because the behavior of animals who twitter, howl, squeak, and roar as they go about their associative lives will henceforth be regarded with a greater sensitivity to the facts of nature.50
It is no accident that we are now entering a period in which the figurative arts too have progressed, in their representation of nature, from the stylizations of the Romanesque to the realism of the Gothic.
Exit the allegorical animal of the bestiary. From now on, whimpers, barks, whinnies, and roars ring out in the symbolic forest inhabited by the beasts, who now say whatever they feel like saying and not what the Physiologus would have them say, thereby refusing to become quasi liber et pictura and just being themselves.51
The second part of this essay chapter incorporates a research project that first appeared under my name, together with those of Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni. The project took shape in a seminar on the history of semiotics at the University of Bologna (during the academic year 1982–1983). After being presented at the Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (see Spoleto 1985), it was published in English in Eco and Marmo, On the Medieval Theory of Signs (1989). For the present book, I have rewritten it, taking into account contributions that have appeared more recently, unburdening it of a number of quotations and erudite notes, and changing the order of the sections. Our original research project identified the classifications in order of complexity, regardless of whether they had appeared before or after one another, whereas in this version I have followed the chronological order, at least within the two traditions—Stoic-Augustinian and Aristotelian-Boethian—because what most concerned me was to underscore the conflict, continually latent, between the correlational and inferential notions of the sign. Hence, while I refer the reader to the original version (cited passim throughout these following notes as Latratus canis 1989) for a more detailed discussion, the other three authors are not to be considered responsible for the present draft. It should be understood, however, that, without their collaboration, my own ideas on the latratus canis would have remained as inarticulate as the g
1. The translation is from Virgil (1999: 66–67).
2. [Translator’s note: The corresponding passage in the Advancement of Learning (1604) runs as follows: “so that the fable and fiction of Scylla seemeth to be a lively image of this kind of philosophy or knowledge; which was transformed into a comely virgin for the upper parts; but then candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris (“with howling monsters girt about her white waist,” Virgil, Eclogue VI, 75), so the generalities of the schoolmen are for a while good and proportionable; but then when you descend into their distinctions and decisions, instead of a fruitful womb for the use and benefit of man’s life, they end in monstrous altercations and barking questions.” The dichotomous image may coincidentally remind us of Shakespeare’s Lear (without the barking): “Down from the waist they are Centaurs, / Though women all above: / But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiends.’ ”]
3. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, with an English translation by Richard M. Gummere, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917, vol. III, pp. 397–411 [“On Instinct in Animals”].
4. On the history of these two versions, see Giuseppe Girgenti, in his commentary on the Italian translation of Porphyry’s De abstinentia (Astinenza dagli animali, Milano, Bompiani, 2005, n. 22 to Book III).
5. Sextus Empricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 69, trans. R. G. Bury, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1955, pp. 41–43.
6. As Sextus himself explains in Outlines of Pyrrhonism II, 158 (p. 253), the fifth nondemonstrable argument “deduces from a disjunctive premiss and the opposite of one of its clauses the other clause,” as for example “Either it is day or it is night; but it is not night; therefore it is day.” Naturally, in the version with the crossroads (as opposed to the one with the ditch) what we have is a “multiple syllogism.”
7. [Translator’s note: Philo’s Greek original survives only in a sixth-century Armenian translation. This and the previous quote are from Abraham Terian, Philonis Alexandrini De Animalibus: The Armenian Text with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Chico, California, Scholars Press, 1981, pp. 87 and 103–4. The English translator criticizes the “syntactical awkwardness” of the Armenian text, and his own translation is in fact quite unidiomatic. In our transcription of the first citation, Terian’s term “shaft,” which would seem to indicate a vertical cavity, has been replaced by “ditch,” indicating a horizontal barrier, more in keeping with the context.]
8. See Plutarch’s Moralia, XII, Trans. by Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1957, pp. 309–479. The same volume (pp. 487–533) contains the dialogue Bruta animalia ratione uti mentioned below.
9. Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, With an English Translation by A. F. Schofield, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1958–9, vol. II, Book VI, para. 59 (pp. 81–83).
10. Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, trans. by Gillian Clark, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 85.
11. Pliny, Natural History, vol. III (Books VIII–XI), translated by H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940, pp. 101–103.
12. See, for example, Columella: “Now, as I promised in the earlier part of my treatise, I will speak of the dumb guardians of the flocks, though it is wrong to speak of the dog as a dumb guardian; for what human being so clearly or so vociferously gives warning of the presence of a wild beast or of a thief as does the dog by its barking? What servant is more attached to his master than is a dog? What companion more faithful? What more wakeful night-watchman can be found? Lastly, what more steadfast avenger or defender?” (De re rustica, books V–IX, trans. E. S. Forster and Edward Heffner, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1954, pp. 305–307). C. Julius Solinus, too, addresses the barking of the dog in his Collectanea rerum mirabilium VI.
13. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof with the collaboration of Muriel Hall, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 253. Likewise, see also Rabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis, VIII De bestiis.
14. “Canis vero ubi vestigium leporis cervive reperit, et ad diverticulum semitae venerit, et quoddam viarum compitum, quod partes in plurimas scinditur, ambians singularum semitarum exordium, tacitus secum ipse pertractat, velut syllogisticam vocem sagicitate colligendi ordoris demittens. Aut certe, inquit, in hanc partem deflexit, aut in illam. Aut certe in humc se anfractum contulit, sed nec in stam, nec in illam ingressus est, superest igitur ut in istam partem se contulerit, et sic falsitate repudiata in veritatem prolabitur” (De bestiis, III, 11, PL 177 86d). A similar text from the same period is found in the Cambridge Bestiary, except that the dog is pursuing, not a hare, but a deer.
15. “It would seem that irrational animals are able to choose. For choice ‘is the desire of certain things on account of an end,’ as stated in Ethics iii, 2, 3. But irrational animals desire something on account of an end: since they act for an end, and from desire. Therefore choice is in irrational animals. Further, the very word electio (choice) seems to signify the taking of something in preference to others. But irrational animals take something in preference to others: thus we can easily see for ourselves that a sheep will eat one grass and refuse another. Therefore choice is in irrational animals. Further, according to Ethics vi, 12, ‘it is from prudence that a man makes a good choice of means.’ But prudence is found in irrational animals: hence it is said in the beginning of Metaph. i, 1 that ‘those animals which, like bees, cannot hear sounds, are prudent by instinct.’ We see this plainly, in wonderful cases of sagacity manifested in the works of various animals, such as bees, spiders, and dogs. For a hound in following a stag, on coming to a crossroad, tries by scent whether the stag has passed by the first or the second road: and if he find that the stag has not passed there, being thus assured, takes to the third road without trying the scent; as though he were reasoning by way of exclusion, arguing that the stag must have passed by this way, since he did not pass by the others, and there is no other road. Therefore it seems that irrational animals are able to choose. On the contrary, Gregory of Nyssa [*Nemesius, De Nat. Hom. xxxiii.] says that ‘children and irrational animals act willingly but not from choice.’ Therefore choice is not in irrational animals. “I answer that, Since choice is the taking of one thing in preference to another it must of necessity be in respect of several things that can