From the Tree to the Labyrinth (7 page)

Some of Llull’s trees (the
Arbor elementalis,
for example) could still be interpreted as representations of the world and its parts, after the model of the
Arbor Porphyriana.
But, rather than a classification of reality, others suggest a classification of knowledge about reality. This is the bent that the Llullism of the humanists and the Renaissance will appear to take, in which more or less tree-like structures are designed to organize universal knowledge into “chapters.”
²²
What we have here is not a classification of substances and accidents, but the
index
of a possible encyclopedia and an attempt to propose an organization of knowledge—an organization so important to the encyclopedist that at times the proposal is limited to the metalinguistic project of organizing this knowledge, putting off its actual investigation till a later date.

The
Margarita philosophica
of Gregor Reisch (1503) is still conceived in a postmedieval spirit. In it, the author, after devising an arboriform index that appears as a schematic frontispiece designed to facilitate consultation, proceeds to “fill it in” with 600 pages of actual encyclopedic information. But often the index is proposed without filling in the blanks, as we see, for instance, in the case of Politian, whose 1491
Panepistemon
is a meticulously structured summary under the aegis of Philosophy personified as mother of the arts or
mater artium.

Under the influence of Llull, the
Dialecticae institutiones
(1543) and the
Dialectique
(1555) of Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Petrus Ramus) both propose a rigorous method for listing in order, without repetitions or omissions, all the branches of knowledge—and the project will be taken up again in the
Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta
of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1620). In the last case, starting with a series of
Praecognita disciplinarum,
we go on to the investigative tools (
lexica,
grammar, rhetoric, logic, oratory, and poetics) needed to confront the major questions addressed by so-called Theoretical Philosophy (metaphysics, pneumatics, physics, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, uranometry, geography, optics, music), then on to Practical Philosophy (ethics, economics, politics, scholastics), arriving eventually at theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and the mechanical arts, as well as a hodgepodge of less well-organized disciplines
(farragines disciplinarum)
such as mnemonics, history, chronology, architectonics, down to issues like euthanasia, gymnastics, and tobaccology.

Here the index is at the very heart of the encyclopedic project, the bones and nerves, as it were, of the discipline (“quasi ossa et nervos disciplinarum”)
,
while the purpose of the project is the form that the universe of knowledge is supposed to assume. As Tega (1999: 113) remarks, “we should not expect to find in the encyclopedia the body, blood and spirit of each single discipline, but only a form devoid of any concrete and particular content.” Alsted’s is thus “the idea of an encyclopedia that not by accident takes as its model, not the work of the
polyhistor
or the philosopher or the scholar, but that of the architect whose job it is to produce a blueprint—or rather, in Alsted’s case, a
table
—of a building that others will construct in stone and marble, while others still will decorate and fill it with objects.”

This is because Alsted was working in a cultural climate in which a project of
Pansophia
was making headway, a form of universal wisdom that includes the entire encyclopedia of knowledge, foreshadowed in the so-called Theaters of the World, ideal architectural structures that attempt to encompass everything memorable, halfway between a mnemonics and an encyclopedia, whose most famous exemplar, never actually realized, remains that laid out in Giulio Camillo’s 1550
Idea del theatro.
²³
The index is intended to demonstrate that the reunification of knowledge is possible, and it does so because in such a climate the reorganization of knowledge is related to the utopian ideal of the reunification of the Christian world, but, like all utopias, it
announces
a reform without succeeding in bringing it about.

If the purpose of the
Arbor Porphyriana,
true to its Aristotelian inspiration, was to propose a methodology for “scientific”
demonstration
or better
definition,
the aim of the
pansophic index
was a
presentation
of the sciences (cf. Luisetti 2001: I, 1). In other words, pansophy is a
classification
of the sciences, and we observed in section 2.1 how far removed classification is from definition.

The Renaissance and Baroque encyclopedia is therefore an ideal rather than a practical project that avoids “filling in” because, even if we were to exhaust the content of every discipline classified, the knowledge we would end up with would always be incomplete, just like the knowledge of any single individual. As far as the encyclopedia goes (as Alsted reminds us, in the “Admonitio” with which his
Encyclopaedia
begins), individuals “are like so many ‘containers,’ each of which is capable of holding a content in keeping with its receptive capacity, none of which, however, is able to contain in itself the whole of knowledge” (Tega 1999: 114).

But, precisely because knowledge is never complete, Ramus begins to conceive of an encyclopedia that can also take into consideration the constitution of disciplines as yet unknown or ill-defined. It is with Francis Bacon that the idea first appears of an encyclopedia based upon data derived from scientific experimentation and criticism of the erroneous opinions expressed in the past (the
idola
)—an
open
repertory, in other words, in a continuous process of development. Bacon’s
Novum Organum
(1620) contains an appendix entitled “Parasceve ad historiam naturalem et experimentalem” (“Introduction to Natural and Experimental History”) in which, after clarifying that we must steer clear of appealing to the authority of the ancients so as to avoid taking on apocryphal information, he draws up an ideal index which includes, in a reasonably logical order, celestial bodies, atmospheric phenomena, the earth, the four elements, natural species (mineral, vegetable, and animal), man, diseases and medicine, the arts, including the culinary arts, equitation, and games. Salomon’s House, envisaged in his
New Atlantis
(1627), is an encyclopedic museum, and we can certainly speak of
farragines disciplinarum
apropos of his
Sylva Sylvarum
(1626), in which, taking into account only the first Century of the Table of Experiments, we find, jostling up against one another, considerations, for instance, concerning the nature of flame and the different techniques for coloring hair and feathers.

The metaphor of the
sylva
or forest is significant. A forest is not ordered according to clear binary disjunctions; instead it is a labyrinth. The labyrinth is explicitly mentioned in the preface to the
Instauratio Magna
(1620): “Aedificium autem hujus universi, structura sua, intellectui humano contemplanti, instar labyrinthi est; ubi tot ambigua viarum, tam fallaces rerum et signorum similitudines, tam obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi, undequaque se ostendunt” (“But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, so many deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled”).
²⁴
To the contemplating intellect, the edifice of the universe manifests itself as a labyrinth, with a maze of ambiguous routes, of deceptive appearances of things and signs, of winding and complicated nodes and spirals—and we will see eventually, apropos of the rhizomic nature of an encyclopedia, how truly prophetic this vision of “obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi” would prove to be.

In this labyrinth, which no longer presents itself as a logical division but as a rhetorical accumulation of notions and topics arranged under
loci,
the Latin verb
invenire
(
=
to find or discover) no longer means to find something one already knew existed, sitting in its proper place, ready to be used for the purposes of argument, but truly to discover some new thing, or the relationship between two or more things, that one was previously unaware of. Such a situation represents (as Rossi 1957, IV and V reminds us) the complete and radical refusal of any preestablished hierarchy among beings. Pursuing an idea that will be taken up again later by Leibniz, in the
Advancement of Learning
Bacon points out that, if a secretary of state is obliged to accumulate a series of records in his official place of business, he will classify them according to the nature of the document (treaties, instructions, etc.), whereas in his private study he will keep all the papers that require his immediate attention together, even though they may be of a heterogeneous nature. The Great Chain of Being is a thing of the past, and from now on every subdivision will invariably be made in context and directed toward a specific end.

We have seen how with Bacon the idea of
inventio
(the noun derived from the verb
invenire
) undergoes a sea change and, instead of referring to the search for something already familiar, is transformed into the discovery of something not yet known. But in this case hunting through the repertory of knowledge is like rummaging through an immense warehouse whose extent is not yet known, and rummaging not simply to put what one finds, whatever it may be, to use, but to construct, so to speak, a bricolage, discovering new syntheses, connections and dovetailings among things that at first sight did not appear to have any reciprocal relationship.

An encyclopedic model is paradoxically offered by Emanuele Tesauro’s
Cannocchiale aristotelico
(“Aristotelian Telescope,” 1665). I say “paradoxically” because, in the very century in which the model of Galileo’s telescope comes into its own as the paradigmatic instrument for the development of the natural sciences, Tesauro proposes a telescope named after Aristotle as an instrument for renewal of what today we would call the human sciences, and the instrument he proposes is metaphor. In the
Cannocchiale,
however, we recognize the fundamental nucleus of Aristotelian rhetoric (of which more in
section 1.8.1
), and the model of metaphor is proposed as a means of discovering unfamiliar relations among the elements of knowledge, though Tesauro’s interest, unlike Bacon’s, is rhetorical rather than scientific.

To construct a repertory of known things, scrolling through which the metaphorical imagination may be led to discover unknown relationships, Tesauro develops the idea of a Categorical Index. He presents his index (with Baroque complaisance for the “marvelous” invention) as a “truly secret secret,” an inexhaustible mine of infinite metaphors and ingenious conceits, given that genius is nothing more or less than the ability to “penetrate the objects deeply hidden beneath the various categories and compare them among themselves”—the ability, in other words, to unearth analogies and similarities that would have passed unnoticed had everything remained classified under its own particular category.

It is sufficient, then, to inscribe in a book Aristotle’s ten categories, the Substance and the nine Accidents, and then list under each category its Members and under each Member the Things “subject to it.”

All we can do for our present purposes is to give a few meager examples of the extensive catalogue Tesauro provides (susceptible in any case of constant expansion). Thus, under the category of Substance, are to be recorded as Members the Divine Persons, Ideas, the Fabulous Gods, Angels, Demons, and Sprites; then, under the Member Heaven, the Wandering Stars, the Zodiac, Vapors, Air, Meteors, Comets, Torches, Thunderbolts, and Winds; and then, under Earth, Fields, Solitudes, Mountains, Hills, and Promontories; under Bodies, Stones, Gems, Metals, Herbs; under Mathematics, Orbs and Globes, Compasses, and Squares; and so on and so forth.

Likewise, for the category of Quantity, under the Quantity of Size are listed the Small, the Large, the Long, and the Short; under the Quantity of Weight, the Heavy and the Light. For the category of Quality, under Sight we find the Visible and the Invisible, the Apparent, the Handsome and the Misshapen, the Bright and the Dark, the White and the Black; under Scent, Sweet Odor and Stench—and so on through the categories of Relation, Action and Passion, Site, Time, Place, and State.

When we take a closer look at the Things subordinate to these Members, we find that, under the category of Quantity and the Member Size, among small things we find the angels (which fit within a point), the incorporeal forms, the pole as the unmoving point of the sphere, the zenith and the nadir; among Elementary Things the spark of fire, the droplet of water, the grain of sand, the scruple of stone, the gem, and the atom; among Human Things, the embryo, the
abortus,
the pigmy, and the dwarf; among Animals, the ant and the flea; among Plants, the mustard seed and the crumb of bread; among the Sciences, the mathematical point; in Architecture the tip of a pyramid; under
Lanaria,
the metal tip of a lace, and so on with a list that goes on for two pages.

We have no need to ask ourselves just how congruous this list is. Incongruity seems to be typical of all of the efforts made in the Baroque period to give an account of the global contents of a field of knowledge, just as it is equally characteristic of many seventeenth-century projects for artificial languages. Gaspar Schott, in his
Technica curiosa
(1664) and his
Joco-seriorum naturae et artis sive magiae naturalis centuriae tres
(ca. 1666) gave notice of a work published in 1653, whose author’s name he claims to have forgotten. In fact the anonymous author seems to have been a certain Pedro Bermudo (1610–1648), a Spanish Jesuit who presented in Rome an
Artificium
or
Arithmeticus nomenclator, mundi omnes nationes ad linguarum et sermonis unitatem invitans. Authore linguae (quod mirere) Hispano quodam, vere, ut dicitur, muto.
²⁵
It is doubtful whether Schott’s is a faithful description, but the issue is irrelevant, since, even if Schott had reworked the project after his own fashion, what interests us is the incongruity of the list. The
Artificium
provided for forty-four fundamental classes, which are worth listing here, giving only a few examples in parentheses: