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

by Umberto Eco

  And since in the intellectual order of the universe the ascent and descent are almost by continuous gradations from the lowest form to the highest and from the highest to the lowest, as we see in the order of beings capable of sensation; and since between the angelic nature, which is intellectual being, and the human nature there is no gradation but rather the one is, as it were, continuous with the other by the order of gradation; and since between the human soul and the most perfect soul of the brute animals there is also no intermediary gradation, so it is that we see many men so vile and in such a state of baseness that they seem to be almost nothing but beasts. Consequently it must be stated and firmly believed that there are some so noble and so lofty in nature that they are almost nothing but angels, for otherwise the human species would not be continuous in both directions, which is impossible.18

  These observations did not prevent Dante from affirming in the De vulgari eloquentiae (I, 2, 5) that animals are incapable of speech and have no need of it (just as angels are endowed with an ineffable intellectual capacity, so that each one understands the thoughts of each of the others, or rather all of them read the thoughts of all of the others in the mind of God). Because they do not have individual but only specific passions, knowing their own they also know those of their congeners, and they have no interest in knowing those of animals of a different species. Likewise demons have no need of discourse because they all know reciprocally the degree of their own perfidiousness. (And we cannot even attempt to transform Dante into an evolutionist ante litteram simply because he permitted himself the rhetorical hyperbole of addressing his lady as an angel!)

  The Middle Ages was not insensitive to the presence of animals. Indeed it was almost obsessively concerned with them in its bestiaries. But, rather than speaking (as occurs in the tradition of the fable), those animals are themselves the signs of a divine language. They “say” many things, but without being aware of it. This is because what they are or what they do become figures of something else. The lion signifies the Redemption by canceling its tracks, the elephant by attempting to lift its fallen companion, the serpent by sloughing off its old skin. Characters in a book written digito Dei (“with the finger of God”), the animals do not produce language, instead they themselves are words in a symbolic language. They are not observed in their actual behaviors, but in those attributed to them. They do not do what they do but what the bestiaries would have them do, so that they can express through their behavior something of which they are totally incognizant.

  This is not all. As mere signs they are completely polyvocal; they serve to communicate different things according to the circumstances and properties highlighted. To confine ourselves to the dog, Rabanus Maurus (IX century) explains why and by virtue of what contradictory properties the dog may represent either the devil, the Jews, or the Gentiles,19 while in the anonymous eleventh-century Libro della natura degli animali or in the De Bestiis attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy the fact that it swallows its own vomit allows the dog to be chosen as a symbol of the repentant sinner, and in the Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio (thirteenth–fourteenth century) the dog that dies defending its master becomes a symbol of Christ who died for our salvation.

  Things are not so very different in the case of the Renaissance emblem books, which are far more dependent on the medieval bestiaries than is commonly thought. Some historians have seen this as a development of the theme of canine intelligence (see, for example, Höltgen 1998), given that, in the best-known source for the emblem books, Horapollon’s fifth-century Hieroglyphica (I, 39), the dog is singled out to represent a sacred scribe or a prophet or an embalmer or the spleen or the sense of smell or laughter or a sneeze (or a magistrate or a judge). But from this abundance of references it is evident that the dog (or any other animal for that matter) lends itself to many interpretations. In the texts that develop the theme in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, such as, for example, Picinelli’s Mondo simbolico (1653) or the various versions of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (between 1556 and 1626), the dog is represented as a symbol of magnanimity, generosity, courage, obedience, love of sacred literature, remembrance of things past, and memory of benefits received, while, at the same time, it is an emblem of sacrilege, stupidity, adulation, buffoonery, and impudence. In Alciati’s one hundred and sixty-fifth emblem “Inanis impetus” (“Antagonism that achieves nothing”), a dog gazes up at the moon as if in a mirror convinced there is another dog up there, and he bays, but the moon continues on its course, and the dog’s bay is carried away vainly on the wind. And in emblem 175 “Alius peccat, alius plectitur” (“One sins and another is punished”), the dog who bites the stone that has been thrown at him is incapable of harming his aggressor. Finally, in an allegory of Logic that appears in the various editions of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica we find two hunting dogs symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge, but one represents truth and the other falsehood—which does not offer much of a guarantee of canine sagacity.

  Still, there is an area of discourse, for the most part indifferent to the universe of symbols, in which we encounter references to animal behavior based on nonfanciful observations, and this occurs in the discussions of language on the part of grammarians, to say nothing of philosophers and theologians, where we encounter canonical references, not merely to articulated language, but also to various forms of interjection or vocal emission, such as the moaning of the sick, the lowing of oxen, the chirping of chickens, the pseudo-language of magpies and parrots, and especially and most frequently the barking of the dog.

  Encountering these references so frequently, we get the obvious impression that each author is borrowing from predecessors a well-worn topos, and is therefore simply repeating concepts handed down by tradition. The dog’s bark is a victim of the inertia of the auctoritates, while the examples migrate automatically from text to text.20

  And yet it pays to proceed cautiously in the case of medieval writers, who realized (if we may be allowed to cite another famous topos) that the nose of their auctoritas was made of wax and could be reshaped ad libitum. The first thing a student of the Middle Ages must do when coming across the same term and—to all intents and purposes—the same concept, is to suspect that this terminological identity masks or conceals an idea that is almost always novel and in each case different.

  If, out of a taste (also medieval) for summing up systems of definitions in trees of the Porphyrian kind, one begins to construct (for every author who mentions the barking of the dog or similar utterances) taxonomies of the various species of utterances and sounds, one becomes aware that, depending on the author, the moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog occupy different positions. Which leads us to suspect that, when different authors spoke of the latratus canis, they had in mind a different zoosemiotic phenomenon, and that this difference in classification implied a difference in underlying semiotics.

  Sometimes, to discover the soul of a philosophical system we must latch on to symptoms at its periphery. Which amounts to saying that sometimes we can better understand the Thomistic system through the implications it produces in a quaestio quodlibetalis than by starting with the Summae Theologiae (to which, however, we must obviously return). This may not be true in every case, but one thing that is sure is that an inquiry into the barking of the dog demonstrates that not only is there a medieval semiotics, but there are in fact many.

  4.2. Latratus Canis

  4.2.1. Names and Signs

  To account for the embarrassing position of the latratus canis in medieval linguistic theories we must bear in mind the fact that Greek semiotics, from the Corpus Hippocraticum to the Stoics, draws a clear distinction between a theory of names (in other words, of verbal language) and a theory of signs. The signs (semeia) are natural phenomena, which today we call symptoms or indices, whose relationship to what they signify is based on the mechanism of inference: if such and such a symptom, then such and such a malady; if this woman produces milk, then she has given birth; where there
’s smoke, there’s fire. Words, on the other hand, bear a different relationship to the things they name or the concept they signify, and this relationship is the one sanctioned by the Aristotelian theory of definition. It is a relationship of equivalency or mutual substitutability.

  Now, these two semiotic lines begin to merge in the Stoics, and this fusion will be explicitly recognized by Augustine (in the De magistro, in the De doctrina christiana, and in the De dialectica).21 In Augustine a science of the signum as the supreme genus takes shape, of which both symptoms and words, the mimetic gestures of actors and the blare of the military trumpet, are species. Still, not even in Augustine is the dichotomy definitively resolved between the relationship of inference, which binds a natural sign to the thing it is a sign of, and the relationship of equivalence, which binds a linguistic term to the concept it signifies or the thing it designates.

  By now medieval semiotics is aware of both lines of thought, but is not yet fully capable of perfecting their unification. This is why, as we shall see, the latratus canis will occupy a different position in different classifications, depending on whether they are classifications of signs in general or of voces. Because the classification of signa is Stoic in origin, while the classification of voces is Aristotelian.

  4.2.2. The Stoic Influence: Augustine

  In his De doctrina christiana (II, 1–4), Augustine proposes his famous definition of the sign. A sign is something which, over and above its sensible aspect, brings to mind something different from itself, like the spoor left by an animal, the smoke from which one infers the presence of fire, the moan that indicates pain, the bugle that communicates orders to a troop of soldiers. Signs are therefore either natural or given. Signa naturalia are those that make something manifest independently of any intention, like the smoke that indicates fire or the tracks left by the animal or even the anger that shows in a face without the angry person wishing to show it. The signa data on the other hand are those emitted in order to communicate the movements of the mind or the contents of one’s thought. We only signify in order to produce in the mind of someone else what we already have in our own. But, on the one hand, what is in the mind of the person emitting the sign is not necessarily a concept; it can also be a psychological state or a sensation; on the other hand, the sign produces something in the mind of the addressee, not necessarily a concept. This is why Augustine places among the signa data both the words of Scripture (in addition of course to human words) and the signs produced by animals, and, in a humane touch, he evokes for us not only the utilitarian relationship between the rooster and the hen in search of food but also the cooing of the turtle dove calling for her mate.22

  He leaves us no choice, then, but to attribute to him the classification shown in Figure 4.1.

  Figure 4.1

  Except that at this point Augustine realizes that he has gone too far, and in his final paragraph he corrects himself, leaving in suspense the question as to whether the call of the dove or the groans of the sick are truly to be considered phenomena of signification. If it were not for this correction, the “language” of the dove would have been firmly situated alongside the words of Holy Scripture. And since it is the latter that he is concerned with, he chooses to shelve the other issue for the time being.

  4.2.3. The Stoic Influence: Abelard

  One solution to the riddle of the dove will make its appearance (albeit somewhat problematically) with Abelard. In his Dialectica (I, iii, 1), the classification he espouses (which in any case does not depart from the Augustinian distinction) can be reduced to the Aristotelian-Boethian model (to be discussed later): meaningful voces may be divided into those than are meaningful naturaliter and those whose meaning proceeds ex impositione or ad placitum (“by convention”); and among the natural utterances he cites the barking of the dog (as an expression of anger).23

  But in his Ingredientibus, another opposition is associated with that between naturaliter and ex impositione, namely, that between significativa and significantia.24

  In order for a word to be significativa it must be an institutio. This institutio is not a convention (like the impositio); instead it is a decision that lies behind both the impositio and the natural significativeness, and could come very close to intentionality. Words signify in fact by means of the institution of human will, which orders them ad intellectum constituere, that is, to produce concepts. Seeing that by his day the barking of the dog must have become a canonical citation, Abelard declares that it is significant of anger and pain, just like a human expression designed to communicate something, because it is instituted by nature, in other words by God, to express this meaning. Thus, the bark can be distinguished from those phenomena that are merely significantia, that is, symptomatic, such as, for example, that same bark that, heard from a distance, allows us merely to conclude that there is a dog somewhere over yonder.

  If a man, then, hears a bark and infers that there is a dog present, this is a symptom being used, by inference, to draw a signification, but the fact that it becomes significant does not imply that it has been instituted as significative. On the other hand, when the dog barks, it does so to express a specific concept (anger or pain or rejoicing), in other words, in order to constituere intellectum (produce concepts) in our minds. Abelard does not say that the dog does so of its own free will: the dog is acted upon by another will, belonging to the natural order (a sort, we might say, of agent will).25 But it is still an intentional agent. Abelard is quite clear: a thing is significative because of the act of will that produces it as such, not because of the fact that it produces meanings.

  Accordingly, Abelard’s taxonomy should be translated as in Figure 4.2.

  Figure 4.2

  Apropos of which, it could be said that where there is institutio, there is some form of code, a correspondence (natural or conventional) between signans and signatum, which cannot be simply a matter of conjecture. But the voces significantes remain a matter for conjecture and therefore inference, and in this sense Abelard sticks to the Stoic distinction that distinguishes between speech act and index or cue.

  4.2.4. Boethius’s Reading of De interpretatione 16a

  This distinction, however, is not so evident in the semiotics clearly derived from Aristotle. Now, if we are to appreciate most of the discussions that follow, we must take as our point of departure, as the Middle Ages did, De interpretatione 16a, where, with the purpose of defining nouns and verbs, Aristotle makes a number of statements about signs in general. Let me attempt a translatio media, which, while taking into account our current versions, endeavors above all to give an account of those aspects that particularly struck the translators and interpreters of the Middle Ages:

  The sounds of the voice (ta en te phone) are symbols (symbola) of the affections (pathematon) of the soul, just as the letters of the alphabet (grammata) are symbols of the things that are in the voice (en te phone). And as the letters of the alphabet are not the same for all men, in the same way neither are the sounds. Nevertheless, sounds and letters are basically signs (semeia) of the affections of the soul, which are the same for everyone, and likewise things (pragmata), of which the affections of the soul are similar images (omoiomata), are the same for everyone. (16a, 1–10)

  A name is a sound endowed with meaning (phone semantike) by convention (kata syntheken). (16a, 20–21)

  Lo Piparo (2003) has proposed a radically different interpretation of this passage,26 but in the present instance we are concerned, not with the philological exegesis of Aristotle, but with seeing how the Middle Ages read this text; and the current interpretation was that what we have on the one hand are things, which impress their images upon the soul (which constitutes their species), while on the other we have the linguistic symbols (sonorous and graphemic) that refer to the affections of the soul, or mental images, ad placitum. But, if this is how the text is to be understood, we ought to draw another conclusion from it: that sounds and letters (independently of their meaning) are also indices (semei
a) of the affections of the soul. An idea that may appear banal in itself (like saying that if someone speaks it is because they have something in their heads that they want to say), but which becomes less banal when we see the advantage that Thomas derives from it indirectly, when he lets it be understood that we do not recognize that man is a rational animal through direct knowledge of his essence, but because he manifests his rationality though language.

  Boethius’s Latin translation, upon which medieval thinkers will base themselves, runs as follows (my emphasis):

  Sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce, earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae; et ea quae scribuntur, eorum quae sunt in voce. Et quemadmodum nec litterae omnibus eaedem, sic nec eaedem voces; quorum autem hae primorum notae sunt, eaedem omnibus passiones animae sunt; et quorum hae similitudines, res etiam eaedem.…

  Nomen ergo est vox significativa secundum placitum sine tempore, cuius pars est significativa separata … Secundum placitum vero, quoniam naturaliter nominum nihil est, sed quando fit nota; nam designant et inlitterati soni, ut ferarum, quorum nihil est nomen.27

  Boethius, then, translates with the same word, nota, both of the Aristotelian terms, symbolon and semeion. What Aristotle meant to say was that the twofold relationship word/concept and letters of the alphabet/words is symbolic, or, as the Middle Ages will interpret it, is based on convention (and for this reason varies from one language to another), whereas the relationship between concept and thing is iconic.

  But if we translate semeion with nota, and understand it to mean “sign” in the contemporary meaning of the word (the sense in which we also speak of a linguistic sign), what Aristotle appears to be saying is that words are symbols and signs of concepts, and that consequently the two terms are synonyms. In addition to leaving in abeyance the idea, previously referred to, that Aristotle was saying that the fact that words are spoken is an index, proof, or symptom of the fact that concepts exist in the mind of the speaker, it also leaves in abeyance the whole universe of indiciary signs, and in this sense it poses a number of serious problems that we will come to grips with in due time.