Fo r at least two millennia, philosophers, theologians, mystics and others have been preoccupied with the idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts. This would have been angelic speech, or that of prelapsarian Adam and Eve, the single holy dialect of humankind before the wounded defeat of Babel, a sort of Chomskyan universal grammar or "pure" language (the reine Sprache of W. Benjamin), spoken when social cement was reinforced with peaceful alliances and concord--until scrimshawed by hatred and war.
Eco, the well-known multinational author of a half-dozen scholarly books and quasi-historical novels (like The Name of the Rose), investigates the history of the idea of a perfect language and tells the story of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history.
From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that speech in the Garden of Eden was just such a language and that all current languages were its decadent descendants--from the catastrophes of the Fall and at Babel. Whether Jeffersonian Hebrew ("God's dialect") or Latin or even Egyptian--or was it French or German?--the recovery of that primitive language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Various versions of these ideas remained particularly current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create such strange systems as Esperanto, or a natural language for artificial intelligence.
In a mostly breathless, gee-whiz style, Eco expatiates on this utopian dream of a perfect language, casting his net widely to analyze the writings of St. Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, to elucidate arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, from mystics like Raymond Lull to the obscure George Dalgarno, from the "taxonomane" John Wilkins to the nomenclature fanatic Francis Lodwick and inventive George Delgarno, and from Leibnitz to Condillac. This is as much a history of the study of language and its origins as it is a tour de force pursuit using scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, thus providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history. Indeed, if the new "Euro" gains wide monetary acceptance in the next century, the Carolingian dream will have been realized at least in practical and palpable terms. Perhaps the phatic vision will not exceed the European grasp by 3000 A.D.!
Eco attempts a subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, linking as well the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized.
One is reminded in all this, first of all, historiographically speaking, of the near-contemporary rise of allegory in late 12th-early 13th century Continental literature (see "Kabbalism and Lullism in the Steganographies," pp. 126 ff.), of the rise of the "post-modern" focus on infinitesimal individualities, multiple perspectives and viewpoints, and "nostalgia for the future," as well as of the parallels in scripting computer code in a simplistic ASCII or HTML, or more complex BASIC.
The author's own bibliographic quirkiness unnerves, with too many allusions that lack references, and too many misleading and careless errors. One glaring omission is Georg Luck's Arcana mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (John Hopkins University Press, 1985), an extremely useful study which could have illuminated Eco on shamanistic background in antiquity.
But after pages and pages of digging into and summarizing the deepest reaches of obscure and dusty tomes on his subject, and in an unforgettable aside, Eco justly berates the new style of "modern-day" scholarship:
Differences are sometimes more important than identities or analogies; still, it would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having seen a single work of Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labelled as a "naif." It is only when we reconsider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an antiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution. (316)
Dittos from this old-fashioned reviewer.