From the Tree to the Labyrinth by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online Page A

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