Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

David Beck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317317371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with 'knowledge' being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.

1 ‘NOT A HUNDRED SORTS OF BEASTS, NOT TWO HUNDRED OF BIRDS’: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE AND THE EARLY MODERN END OF THE WORLD

James Dougal Fleming

Language was universal before it was. That, at least, was the view of John Wilkins, George Dalgarno and other theorists of a ‘real character’ in and around the early Royal Society. These Baconian innovators, part of a broader European movement, sought to displace linguistic multiplicity and ambiguity by a single, rational and objective semiotic.¹ In so doing, they conceived themselves to be reorienting human communication toward its natural and default state. The book of Genesis – notably in the tower of Babel episode – clearly and explicitly stated that the number of human languages was originally and properly one. The confusion of tongues, though a curse laid on humanity by an angry God, was by that token nothing more or less than a distortion of an underlying order. True, none of the resulting seventeenth-century schemes for universal language came to much success, and learned belief in the literal truth of the Bible would not survive the Enlightenment. What would survive, nonetheless, was the Baconians’ basic attitude toward linguistic diversity.

After all, linguistic unity has remained a technological desideratum ever since the seventeenth century. The various post-seventeenth century schemes for artificial language, the extermination of regional idiolects in the centralization and stabilization of nation-states, and the commercial tendency toward global linguae francae are just a few obvious expressions of this typically modern impulse. Today, we may be witnessing its apotheosis. Microsoft, Google and other internet companies are marketing online translation apps with significant functionality and the potential for universality: every language, eventually, translating to every other, automatically and more or less accurately.² These technologies are in turn made possible by ‘information’ in the technical- or machine-level sense: the strings of ones and zeros, arranged through binary notation and Boolean algebra, into which computers reduce all languages (including the various programming languages).³ From the perspective of computer science, in other words, information as such already is the universal language. Linking the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, in this respect, is the persistent assumption that languages - though they seem many – are really, or fundamentally, or properly, one.

I will argue this assumption to be incorrect. I will further argue that the Baconian character planners are, at least in part, to blame for it. We can watch Dalgarno and Wilkins, in particular, formulating the unitary phenomenology of language that modernity has ever since taken for granted. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be a valid phenomenology of language at all. As Hans-Georg Gadamer once suggested, in an argument that I will try to make good, there is no content to the idea of a language, absent diversity. If not, then considerable turbidity enters the idea of trying to achieve – through any technology – linguistic unity. The significance of this matter is not only for the seventeenth century, but also for our own. The real character project, I will argue here, offers a phenomenological purchase on the attempt to universalize language through information technology.

No Such Thing As

Admittedly, juxtaposing IT with the Baconian approach to language in the seventeenth century runs a risk of anachronism. The risk has to do with ‘language’. If by that term we mean an over-arching, synthetic and singular semiotic category – the whole momentous business of words, whether written or spoken - then it is far from clear that Wilkins and the others would have understood us. For them, ‘language’ was a word determined and limited by its root: langue- age, a tonguing, or a giving tongue. As such it was distinguished from graphic or glyphic systems – written ‘characters’. Moreover, the interrelationship between speaking and writing, language and character was not necessarily one of very great phenomenological significance. I do not mean here to defend any wider claim about the philological profile of the seventeenth century, but only to point out that the project of the real character involved a dogmatic categorical splitting. On the lexicon with which the Baconian character planners began their work, a ‘language’ was essentially, even merely, oral.

‘The expression of the minde or thoughts’, writes Francis Lodwick in his Ground-Work; or, Foundation, Laid … for the Framing of a New Perfect Language (1652), ‘is either by the Tongue or Pen most generally performed’.⁴ ‘Concerning languages’ Lodwick goes on to enumerate a number of ‘inconveniencies’, before turning to writing. This has manifest advantages, but is, unfortunately, ‘limited to the Languages, and joyntly travelling with them’.⁵ One misses Lodwick’s point entirely – indeed, one is scarcely able to follow his discussion – unless one keeps in mind that ‘languages’, for him, are by definition speakings. Cave Beck, in the introduction to his The Universal Character (1657), sounds a standard Baconian lament for the ‘Equivocal words, Anomalous variations, and superfluous Synonomas (with which all languages are encumbred)’. He then offers his character as ‘a Clew to direct us out of this Laborinth of Languages’.⁶ Modern readers may be moved to respond with post-Saussurean smugness: surely Beck’s numerical cypher is (as it were) always-already a language. But not for him – not, at least, until the character is retrofitted with phonemes, becoming effable. And even then, it is precisely and only the effable projection of the character that is a ‘language’; and even then, the language remains crucially distinct from the graphic scheme that underpins, orders and controls it. Like many period theorists in this area, Beck appeals to the example of ‘the Chinois’, who ‘have a general Character, which serves themselves and their Neighbours, though of different Languages’.⁷ Precisely because Chinese zì (what we still call ‘characters’) are not a ‘language’ – not oral – they serve as a common ground among multiple, and mutually unintelligible, idiolects.

John Wilkins, seen by the period as the greatest of the Royal Society semioticians, offers a similarly differentiated product in his An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language.⁸ The title is not a redundancy, but a genuine conjunction: two things linked, not one thing reiterated. This is much repeated in the opening pages of Wilkins’s text: we read of ‘Tongues and Letters’, ‘Characters, and Languages’, ‘a new kind of Character and Language’, and so on.⁹ Wilkins’s project is predicated on immense humanistic learning, and involves him in a brisk survey of multiple tongues, both European and exotic, for their origins and interrelations. Yet the whole point, as with Beck, is to demonstrate the need to escape the organic confusion of multicultural orality. Thus while Wilkins, again like Beck (and Dalgarno), is determined to make his character effable, this is precisely by way of relating one phenomenon to another: he will ‘shew how this Character may be made effable, in a distinct Language’.¹⁰ But Wilkins insists that he is not thereby just adding to the number of tongues. That would be ‘like the inventing of a Disease’, for which a man can ‘expect little thanks from the World’.¹¹ Rather, Wilkins is extending the work of his character into orality, in order to bring the latter under philosophy. The character holds immense epistemological promise, precisely because it comes from outside ‘language’.

George Dalgarno, Wilkins’s sometime collaborator, differs somewhat from his more famous and prestigious colleague by placing a strong emphasis on the effability of his character. Yet this is an exception that proves the rule: for Dalgarno has to make an argument for the theoretical importance of the tongue. In his Art of Signs (1661) he laments:

the ignorance of those (and even learned men must be reproached with this error) who have a high estimation of the art of signs in mute figures, that is to say a Universal Character (as it is usually called), but who wish to hear nothing of a new language.¹²

‘Do words offend the ears?’, he demands:

If signs that are not rationally instituted (and the words of all languages are such) allow the transformation of sounds into figures and of figures back into sounds, which is a noble and useful art, how much more is this feature of excellence to be desired in rationally instituted signs?’¹³

Dalgarno is pointing the way, as we will see below, to a retheorization of the language/character divide. This will eventuate, arguably, in a semiotic reframing of the category. But when he gets there, Dalgarno will have to argue the point all over again; and, in any case, he is not there yet. The Dalgarno of the Art of Signs, even while asserting that ‘the art of characters and sounds is one and the same’, goes on – in the same breath – to point out that ‘the easier of the two should be presented first; for to anyone who has fully grasped the use of the language I can teach the use of the character within a single hour’.¹⁴ Even for Dalgarno, a character is not a language.

The posited non-identity of language and character, with effability as the line of demarcation between them, is in fact crucial to the whole Baconian project of Wilkins, Dalgarno and their peers. As is well known, early modern thinkers, including Bacon, assumed that all people had the same primary notions of the same things. Indeed, they assumed that things and notions were ontologically toggled. For Bacon, there is no big epistemological problem just insofar as our minds intuit the world. Rather, there is a big cognitive and interpretative problem, mandating a set of sustained technological interventions, insofar as our minds fail correctly to intuit the world. Strictly speaking, therefore, it understates the period assumption to say that people have notions of things. It would be more accurate (if also more awkward) to say that people have thing-notions: intuitions that manifest their objects almost as a mirror does a face. On a residually Aristotelian basis, the period maintains a speculative conception (from the Latin speculum) of perception and cognition. This medieval holdover grounds the seventeenth-century idea that it might be possible in principle to construct a semiotics reflecting the structure of reality.¹⁵

But first, one had to deal with languages (that is, with the tongues). For it was precisely at that level – the level of intensional expression through haphazardly instituted and fluid words – that the prima facie potential accord between our minds and the world was held to be wrecked. Bacon’s statement of the case (against the idols of the marketplace) is canonical, and exercised an enormous influence on the character planners of the early Royal Society. ‘Words are mostly bestowed to suit the capacity of the common man’ Bacon writes:

and they dissect things along the lines most obvious to the common understanding. And when a sharper understanding, or more careful observation, attempts to draw those lines more in accordance with nature, words resist. Hence it happens that the great and solemn controversies of learned men often end in disputes about words and names. But it would be wiser (in the prudent manner of the mathematicians) to begin with them, and to reduce them to order by means of definitions. However, in the things of nature and matter, definitions cannot cure this fault. For the definitions themselves consist of words, and words beget words.¹⁶

Language, the very tool by which we seek to build and share knowledge out of perception, is limited by vulgar tradition, and therefore vitiated for real knowledge. What is worse, the tools that come to hand when we try to ameliorate this situation – definitions, technical terms, rhetorical reforms, etc. – are in the last analysis just more of the same vitiatory matrix: language. True, we can at least exit orality, and turn to the written word. We thereby gain certain familiar advantages for the expression of our thoughts: stability, permanency, transportability, and so on. But the written word, normatively, denotes the spoken word. Insofar as it follows and copies (spoken) language, a written character is always- already broken along with the latter.

The key move, for the seventeenth-century planners of a real character – picking up on the exotic example of Chinese zì, on the local traditions of emblems and hieroglyphs, and on the technological implications of mnemonics and shorthand – came when they realized that signification didn’t have to work that way: that it ought to be possible, in pri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I: Unity and the Investigation of Nature
• Part II: God’s Two Books
• Part III: Imagination and Reality: Time, Zoology and Memory
• Notes
• Index