glyphs each of the ultimate terms in his branching tables. To rocket
language beyond ambiguity, he invented a script that looked like
squadrons of tiny antennaed spaceships. The problem was that there
were 2,030 distinct characters, so that to use them would require
prodigious feats of memory. As a work-around, Wilkins then
represented each glyph by combinations of letters. “For instance,”
he wrote, “If (De) signifie Element then (Deb) must signifie the first
difference; which (according to the Tables) is fire: and (Debά) will
denote the first Species, which is Flame. (Det) will be the first
difference under that Genus, which is Appearing Meteor; (Detά) the
first Species, viz. Rainbow; (Deta) the second, viz. Halo.” But loading
each letter with such a huge burden of information was dangerous;
stuff happens, including misprints. For example, if my son writes to
me about his “psythology” instead of “psychology” paper, chances
are I’ll chalk it up to a late night out, but if Wilkins’s “Deb” appears
in lieu of “Det,” we’re dealing with a meteor instead of a fire.
The pitfall of Wilkins’s Essay is not the multiplicity of characters;
it’s the multiplicity of words. Heaping up terms to make precise
categories and heaping up categories to make precise distinctions,
Wilkins delivered heaps and heaps of words, not universal ideas.
Moreover, tall stacks of words were left off the tables; an appendix
includes a dictionary of some fifteen thousand English words keyed
to the tables by synonyms and periphrases. In Wilkins’s system,
there was even a metaphor particle that magically transformed any
word into a figure of speech—“dark,” for example, into “mystical. ”2
Figures within characters, characters within universes, wheels within
wheels.
Wilkins’s very public failure to invent a language purely of ideas
provoked extreme responses. On one hand, the German philosopher
and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) sought a
method for producing knowledge rather than organizing, defining,
and representing it. His caracteristica were designed to reckon with
truths as one would with numbers, to conduct ratiocination by
means of numerical ratios. And with such a calculus, blind to the
particular propositions being manipulated, Leibniz claimed the
power to put truths to the test, and even to discover new ones. On
the other hand, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), in Gul iver’s Travels
(1726), skewered the idea of a “Universal Language to be
understood in all civilized Nations.” In the Academy of Lagado,
Gulliver encounters “a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words
whatsoever;… that since Words are only Names for Things, it would
be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as
were necessary to express the particular Business they are to
discourse on.” “I have often,” continues the empiricist Gulliver,
“beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their
Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets,
would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold
Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements,
help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.”
Leibniz envisioned a shining steel language of logic beyond the
stain of things; Swift satirized a bulky language of things beyond the
trammels of logic. At the end of the dream of a universal language
without misunderstanding lies a language without words.
3. A World of Words
By the end of the seventeenth century, the British philosopher John
Locke (1632–1704) delivered a death blow to philosophical language
projects. For Locke, the notion of words (or characters) with
transparent, universal meanings was worse than a fantasy: “It is a
perverting the use of words,” Locke wrote, “and brings unavoidably
obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make
them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our minds.”
Locke’s stark, uncompromising theory of language in his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) sapped words of all their
power: the power to infallibly represent and refer, the power to
convey one person’s ideas to another, above all, their power to
propound and compound knowledge.
Wilkins and Locke are divided by the watershed between ancient
and modern views of language. Where Wilkins had been invested in
the notion of a divine “curse” of Babel, Locke grounded the human
capacity to understand (or misunderstand) language in God-given
liberty. “Every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand
for what ideas he pleases,” 3 wrote Locke, that no one could possibly
evoke his own ideas in another’s mind. In Locke’s view, such mental
“liberty” is rarely disruptive of communication when dealing with
simple ideas; but when it came to moral ideas “concerning honour,
faith, grace, religion, church &c.,” 4 one was as likely to
misunderstand a term in one’s own tongue as in a foreign one: “If
the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were
applied to another … [there would be] two languages.” 5
Locke approached this predicament as a trial for society rather
than as a conundrum for consciousness. Human beings, he observed
empirically, were willing to forgo the radical liberty of language in
favor of convention and conformity, entering into a sort of linguistic
social contract. Speakers of a language were to avoid abusing words
(especially as metaphor, which he libeled, famously, a “perfect
cheat”); otherwise “men’s language will be like that of Babel, and
every man’s words, being intelligible only to himself, would no longer
serve to conversation and the ordinary affairs of life” (my italics). It
was for a novelist, Laurence Sterne, to reveal both the darkness and
the comedy in Locke’s vision, suspending his characters in Tristram
Shandy (1759–1767) between “hobby-horse” solipsism and dire
miscommunication. When the amorous, anxious Widow Wadman
asks Uncle Toby where he was injured during the Siege of Namur,
Uncle Toby does not point to his mauled groin. Instead, he builds
her a scale model of the battlefield and points to a bridge.
Where?… There.
After Locke, the era of the a priori language project—a
philosophically rigorous language created from whole cloth—gave
way to reformist a posteriori projects, which involved rationalizing
existing languages. Such projects were abetted by a new interest in
discovering a “universal grammar,” residing deep within existing
languages; this, in turn, prompted the development of “laconic,”
pared-down, grammars of European languages. By 1784, a
rationalized, regularized French was disseminated in Count Antoine
de Rivarol’s “On the Universality of the French Language.” In the
glare of the French Enlightenment, language became the spear of
reason, renovation, and revolution, and the ensuing revolutionary-
Napoleonic period became a crucible for the power of language to