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

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.

1.3.4.  The Cannocchiale aristotelico of Emanuele Tesauro
    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