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

by Umberto Eco

  6. Perhaps, however, it is the unresolved persistence of this gap that accounts for the influence Croce’s works have enjoyed: readers grasped the abstractness of the few ideas, but they were attracted to them because they saw them as the logical conclusion of the concrete analysis, admirable for its common sense, clarity, and penetration. In the hotchpotch the readers recognized both the embarrassments of their own personal experience and their longing for an uncontaminated idea of beauty, truth, goodness, and the useful itself—values that all the metaphysical systems so abhorred by Croce had defined in their hyperuranic spiritual nature, without descending to compromise with that corporality that is mere envelope, mortal coil, the prison of the soul. In Croce they saw both the confirmation of the inevitable and the promise of the desirable, interpreting as systematic mediation what was instead an unresolved contradiction.

  These readers were delighted to be told that art was fundamentally what they were hoping it was, and non-art what they—perturbed and disturbed—could witness all around them. What exactly pure forms were they did not know, but they were quick to embrace a judgment of taste such as that on Proust: “one feels that what is dominant in the author’s soul is a rather perverse sensual eroticism, an eroticism that already permeates his eagerness to relive the sensations of a distant past. But this state of mind does not achieve clarity in a lyric motif or a poetic form, as occurs instead in the better works of the less complicated but more inspired Maupassant” (“Postille” to La poesia). Of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Croce asserts “the critics stubbornly continue to analyze and discuss it as an inspired and poetically successful novel,” whereas all it is “from one end to the other, is a novel of moral exhortation, measured and conducted with a firm eye” (La poesia, VII). And, if I may be forgiven the invidious comparison (the two texts after all display certain similarities), when in 1937, one year after the appearance of La poesia, a much lesser writer attempted to justify his Philistine parody of Manzoni, after praising the author’s workmanship in I promessi sposi (“ah! what a genius he was!”), he adduced the following alibi for the sacrilege he was about to commit: “The truth is this: that in Manzoni the only thing missing is the poet.… Is there a single episode, a character, a personage that remains impressed on my mind with the same ever purer and more glittering clarity that characterizes the immortal creations of art? Well, if I must be sincere, I have to reply in the negative” (Da Verona 1937: viii–xiii).

  The thought occurs to us that, instead of Croce creating a readership of Croceans, a readership that already existed, with its own myths and its own unshakable uncertainties regarding the good and the beautiful, adopted him as their spokesperson.

  For this readership (and for our good fortune) Croce was then obliged (in La poesia) to open up a no man’s land (no man’s and everyman’s), where hotchpotch and purity could live together in peace and reconciliation, a space he called literature. To this space Croce could allocate the entertainments composed by the likes of Dumas and Poe, whom he basically enjoyed, as well as the works of authors he did not relish, like Horace and Manzoni. “Literature” is not a spiritual form, it is a part of civility and good manners, it is the realm of prose and civil conversation.

  And this is the region from Croce writes. Why are Croce’s readers not aware of the unresolved contradiction, why do they see a well-knit system where things were falling apart? Because Croce is a masterly writer. The rhythm, the subtle dosage of sarcasm and pacific reflection, the perfection of his periodic sentences, make everything he thinks or says persuasive. When he says something, he says it so well, that, being said so well, it is unthinkable that it shouldn’t also be true. Croce, the great master of oratory and style, succeeds in convincing us of the existence of Poetry (incorporeal and angelified as he understands it) through a corporeal, courtly, harmonious example of Literature.4

  A reworking of a book review, written for La rivista dei libri in October 1991, of the new edition of Croce’s Estetica published in 1990 by Adelphi. The essay was republished in Eco (1997) with the title “Croce e l’intuizione” (but it was not included in the English translation of that work, Kant and the Platypus [Eco 2000]). [Translator’s note: Page references to Croce’s Estetica in this chapter are to the English translation by Colin Lyas (Croce 1992).]

  1. The work was first published by Sandron in 1902 (when Croce was thirty-five years old) and represented the point of arrival of a study begun in 1898. After an initial reprint by Sandron in 1904, subsequent editions were published by Laterza, with the ninth edition—the last in the author’s lifetime—appearing in 1950. For three of these reprintings, Croce wrote new prefaces (dated November 1907, September 1921, and January 1941) pointing out corrections that he had made in the text (see Maggi 1989) to bring it into line with the subsequent development of his thought (his Logica, Filosofia della pratica, Teoria e storia della storiografia, and, naturally, his Breviario d’estetica, Aesthetica in nuce, Problemi di estetica, Nuovi saggi di estetica, and La poesia). Since the author did not make any changes after the 1941 edition, we must presume that he still considered it current at mid-century. The 1941 ne varietur is the text reprinted by Adelphi and discussed in what follows.

  2. The reader is referred to De Mauro (1965: ch. IV).

  3. [Translator’s note: This characterization of Croce’s philosophy is that of fellow Italian Idealist and sometime collaborator Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The four words in question were aesthetics, logic, economics, and ethics.]

  4. [Translator’s note: In his criticism Croce opposes poesia (= poetry), the term he applies to inspired art, and non-poesia (= non-poetry), which he also he calls allotria (= extraneous matter, padding), struttura, or simply, with negative implications, letteratura (= literature or intellectual confectionery). Croce’s dichotomy is famously hard on the structural elements in that most structured of works, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Croce and his disciples dominated Italian literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.]

  17

  Five Senses of the Word “Semantics,” from Bréal to the Present Day

  The term “semantics” has a number of different meanings, several of which seem to be completely at odds with one another. This state of affairs is often a source of considerable embarrassment in dealing with our students, to whom we find ourselves having to explain that our discipline is a bit like the country where some people call “red” what others call “white” and vice versa. With the result that, every time we use the word “red,” we would have to assign it a superscript or subscript number, specifying that we mean “red1, in such and such a sense.”

  Still, although the term “semantics” may have a number of meanings, those meanings are less irreconcilable than might at first appear.

  In 1883 Michel Bréal (Les lois intellectuelles du langage: Fragment de sémantique) defined semantics as the science of meaning, but when he came to publish his Essai de sémantique in 1897 he gave it the more general subtitle Science des significations, and only in chapter IX, in which he proposed to examine “by what causes words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, are induced to restrict, to extend, to transfer this meaning from one order of ideas to another, to raise or to lower its dignity, in short to change it,” does he say “it is this second part which, properly speaking constitutes Semantics or the Science of Significations.”1

  Semantics, then, is the science of meanings, but, for Bréal, only insofar as they are subject to historical development. And this is not all. Each time Bréal has to deal with the meaning of a word he proves incapable of isolating it from the set of enunciates, or more extensive fragments of text, in which the word appears. To give but a single example, in the chapter on the laws of specialization, Bréal is less interested in defining the meaning of the French word plus than in the fact that it takes on different meanings in different expressions.

  The notion of semantics, then, is born, historically speaking, in reference to that imponderabl
e entity we label meaning, but only to a lesser extent is it concerned with the meaning of words, or, to put it differently, of terms in isolation. For this, what was needed was not a science but an empirical praxis, lexicography in its most hands-on sense, that is, the actual compilation of dictionaries. Still, we must not forget that the whole of lexicography is simply the description of a langue, and therefore of an abstract entity, and not of the practical use of parole by means of which the speaker “means” something.

  17.1. Various Meanings of Semantics

  I would argue that the more or less explicit semiotics of former centuries did not question the fact that terms expressed something, but they did not presume that a special science was needed to clarify what that something was. Knowing the signs implied knowing either the things they referred to or the ideas they brought to mind, or the definitions given them by common consent, according to which the Latin homo, for instance, signified “a mortal rational animal.” In any case, for Aristotle, providing correct definitions was a task either for logic (see the Analytics) or for the various natural sciences, as is seen in his definitions of animals.

  If we examine Abelard’s use of terminology, we remark that a verbal expression (i) significat a mental concept, (ii) designat or denotat its definition or “meaning,” and (iii) nominat the thing.

  What we have here are three notions of semantics: (i) as the study of cognitive processes, (ii) as the study of dictionary or encyclopedia definitions, and (iii) as the study of the truth conditions of sentences. Many of our current problems stem from these medieval perplexities (and they are indeed perplexities: what exactly does a vox significativa do—signify, denote, or name?). Furthermore, Abelard’s threefold division is missing a fourth dimension, not unknown to previous semiotics, that of the disambiguation of complex texts (see Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, which is concerned with the “meaning” of a text like that of Scripture). And, lastly, there is also a fifth dimension missing, whose absence in Abelard does not imply its absence in medieval thought. What is missing is what we would call today a structural semantics as a theory of content, already present in the binary system of the division of predicables as represented in the Arbor Porphyriana (see Chapter 1).

  Let us go back then, or let us look forward, beyond Abelard and beyond Bréal, and observe that, in the course of the debates on meaning, five areas of investigation have been identified, sometimes proceeding independently of each other, sometimes contradicting each other, and sometimes one of them presupposing—however acritically—the other:

  1. Semantics as the study of the meaning of terms removed from any context (for instance, Carnap’s theory of meaning postulates, much of componential semantics, and the various forms of semic analysis, not to mention lexicography of every kind and tendency).

  2. Semantics as the study of content systems or structural semantics (Hjelmslev and structural approaches to semantic fields in general et similia).

  3. Semantics as the study of the relation between term (or sentence) and referent, or as the study of reference (for instance, Morris, Ogden, and Richards, much of analytic philosophy, and in primis Kripke). Let me remind the reader, however, of the distinction I posited in Kant and the Platypus between (i) providing instructions to identify the possible referent of a term and (ii) the act of reference itself.

  4. Semantics as the study of the truth conditions of propositions expressed by sentences.

  5. Semantics as the study of the particular meaning that terms or sentences assume in context or in the text as a whole (this is a vast and variegated field that is concerned with the meaning of the same sentences in different contexts and circumstances, for which we may cite in first and foremost the later Wittgenstein, as well as the theory of different discursive isotopies, etc.).

  Any student of semiotics is familiar with all these meanings of semantics, and yet it would be optimistic to claim that this awareness is shared by all students of language—not to mention the fact that the semioticians themselves, though well aware of the definition of semantics cited in 3 and 4 above, are often prone to reject it as nonpertinent, or to consider it as a single problem, whereas in fact it involves two quite different problems.

  17.2. Encyclopedia Entries

  Let us consider a few examples of how the different conceptions of semantics may fail to recognize one another. In the Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences du langage of Greimas and Courtés, “truth” is defined.2 The concept of truth might be foreign to a semanticist in senses 1 and 2, but it is certainly central for anyone concerned with senses 3 and 4 and, as Greimas demonstrates, it cannot be sidestepped by someone concerned with sense 5:

  Truth designates the complex term which subsumes the terms being and seeming situated on the axis of contraries within the semiotic square of veridictory modalities. It might be helpful to point out that the true is situated within the discourse, because it is the fruit of veridiction operations; this thus excludes any relation (or any homologation) with an external referent.

  I suspect that an analytic philosopher would find this definition confused and troublesome. But it would also be troublesome for someone concerned with semantics in sense 3, while it would have to be viewed with some indulgence by someone concerned with sense 4. In fact a truth-conditional approach is not concerned with establishing whether a given proposition is true but rather with what inferences one might legitimately draw if the proposition were true. What is certain is that, for someone who subscribes to sense 4, these truth conditions are posited within a “corporate body,” or coherent set of assumptions. When, however, doubt is cast upon the existence of this holistic system, as it is in Davidson, we may say that the principle of charity leads us to assume that a proposition makes sense and is therefore true within a discursive exchange (even if the sentence that conveys it does not present itself as especially perspicuous). Are we then to say that Greimas’s definition is so foreign to the analytical koine? I am not so sure. Granted, if someone says to me on the freeway “Look out, there’s a train ahead,” and I am aware that what is in front of me is a trailer truck, given that I have certain convictions concerning the real world, and appealing to the principle of charity, I assume that the speaker meant to say that there was a big rig ahead, and I let the communicative interaction go forward without a hitch. But do I only exercise the principle of charity in cases where I am able to counter an ambiguous sentence with certain convictions based on experience (that is, on what I consider to be true in the outside world), or do I not also behave in the same way when I attribute to someone else convictions that coincide with those I hold on the basis of a shared system of assumptions?

  Let us suppose that a student of astronomy were to say to me: “Assuming that, after Galileo, the sun revolves around the earth and not vice versa,” I understand perfectly well, based on a shared system of assumptions, that he is asserting something false, but, applying the principle of charity, I assume that what he meant to say was what I consider to be true, in other words, the exact opposite of what he actually said (and that what he said was a common or garden lapsus), and I go on listening to his argument. In such a case I would be considering as true not what is confirmed by my experience of the outside world but what is guaranteed to be true by the holistic system of our received assumptions. We have only to stretch a little the notion of “situated within the discourse” for the conversation between a Greimasian and a Davidsonian, provided each of them exercises a reasonable principle of charity, to lose its dramatic edge.

  But let us proceed with our examples. In the Einaudi Enciclopedia, under the entry “Semantica,” Diego Marconi—after defining semantics as the study of meaning—assumes that standard semantics is concerned only with natural languages. He devotes the bulk of his article to model semantics (sense 4), the semantics of possible worlds (senses 3 and 4), the dictionary vs. encyclopedia discussion (sense 1), but only in his introduction does he mention the existence of another tendency known as componential an
alysis (which is certainly concerned with meaning 1 and, for the purpose of establishing theoretically the number of components, presupposes sense 2).

  The fact is that Marconi, at the time of writing, was an orthodox analyst and shared the conviction, common to many of his persuasion, that these problems were part and parcel of lexicography (senses 1 and 2); and for the analysts lexicography had nothing to do with semantics.

  In the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics edited by T. A. Sebeok (1986), the entry “Semantics,” written by Bierwisch, at first tries to elude the often mortal embrace between semantics and the study of natural languages. After defining semantics as the study of meaning, Bierwisch excogitates the formula “A interprets B as representing C,” in which B is an object or an event, which permits it to be understood as something different from a phonation or a verbal enunciate. The author lists all the problems and takes into account the various positions, but in the body of the article he gives his own personal solution to these problems. Thanks to a happy decision by the editorial board, an entry on “Seme” (by Schogt) follows, in which we find a broad investigation into other linguistic positions, for the most part structural in their orientation (Lyons, Lamb, Pottier, Apresjan, Coseriu, Buyssens, Prieto, Greimas, etc.). Unfortunately, there is no mention of truth-conditional semantics—for some scholars the only semantics worthy of the name.