1.3.7. The
Encyclopédie
In fact Leibniz anticipates the project later theorized by D’Alembert in the opening pages of the Encyclopédie, and it is on the basis of Leibniz’s suggestions that, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the premises for a critique of any attempt to found an a priori system of ideas begin to take shape. The Enlightenment encyclopedia is determined to be critical and scientific: it refuses to censor any belief, even those considered erroneous, but it exposes them for what they are (see, for instance, the entry on the unicorn, which appears to describe the animal according to tradition, but at the same time underscores its legendary nature). Following the model of the ancient encyclopedia, it aspires to give an account of the entirety of human knowledge, even the “mechanical” knowledge associated with arts and crafts.
True, the model of the Enlightenment encyclopedia is based on a kind of tree-like pattern (Figure 1.14).
Figure 1.14
But D’Alembert, in his “Preliminary Discourse” to the Encyclopédie, while providing information concerning the criteria according to which the work was organized—not immediately obvious given its alphabetical rearrangement—develops on the one hand the metaphor of the tree while simultaneously calling it into question, speaking instead of a “terrestrial globe” and of a labyrinth:
The general system of the sciences and the arts is a sort of labyrinth, a tortuous road which the intellect enters without quite knowing what direction to take.… However philosophic this disorder may be on the part of the soul, an encyclopedic tree which attempted to portray it would be disfigured, indeed utterly destroyed.…
Finally, the system of our knowledge is composed of different branches, several of which have a common point of union. Since it is not possible, starting out from this point, to begin following all the routes simultaneously, it is the nature of the different minds that determines which route is chosen.…
It is not the same with the encyclopedic arrangement of our knowledge. This consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and the arts simultaneously. From there he can see at a glance the objects of their speculations and the operations which can be made on these objects; he can discern the general branches of human knowledge, the points that separate or unite them; and sometimes he can even glimpse the secrets that relate them to one another. It is a kind of world map which is to show the principal countries, their position and their mutual dependence, the road that leads directly from one to the other. This road is often cut by a thousand obstacles, which are known in each country only to the inhabitants or to travelers, and which cannot be represented except in individual, highly detailed maps. These individual maps will be the different articles of the Encyclopedia and the Tree or Systematic Chart will be its world map.
But as, in the case of the general maps of the globe we inhabit, objects will be near or far and will have different appearances according to the vantage point at which the eye is placed by the geographer constructing the map, likewise the form of the encyclopedic tree will depend on the vantage point one assumes in viewing the universe of letters. Thus one can create as many different systems of human knowledge as there are world maps having different projections.…
… But often such an object, which because of one or several of its properties has been placed in one class, belongs to another class by virtue of other properties and might have been placed accordingly. Thus, the general division remains of necessity somewhat arbitrary.29
D’Alembert’s discourse still suffers from an unresolved tension between the model of the tree and the model of the map. It becomes clear that the sum of our knowledge (present, but also, as it was for Leibniz, future) extends like a geographical map without borders, within which infinite itineraries are possible. But, given that the Encyclopédie, in its printed form, is in alphabetical order, one knows one will need to resort to a number of reductive strategies.
What we already have, however, is a first hint at the ideal model of an encyclopedia, that is, a hypothetical compendium of all of the knowledge available to a given culture.
1.4. The Maximal Encyclopedia as Regulatory Idea
The encyclopedia is potentially infinite because it is forever in fieri, and the discourses we construct on its basis constantly call it into question (in the same way in which the latest article by a nuclear scientist presupposes a series of encyclopedic notions concerning the structure of the atom, but at the same time introduces new ones that render the old ones moot).
The Maximal Encyclopedia is not content with merely recording what “is true” (whatever meaning we may choose to give to this expression). It records instead everything that has been claimed in a social context, not only what has been accepted as true, but also what has been accepted as imaginary.
It exists as a regulating principle: yet this regulating idea, which cannot constitute the starting point for a publishable project because it has no organizable form, serves to identify portions of encyclopedias that can be activated, insofar as they serve to construct provisional hierarchies or manageable networks, with a view to interpreting and explaining the interpretability of certain segments of discourse.
This encyclopedia is not available for consultation in toto because it is the sum total of everything ever said by humankind, and yet it has a material existence, because what has been said has been deposited in the form of all the books ever written and all the images ever made and all the evidential items that act as reciprocal interpretants in the chain of semiosis.
Having become transformed over the centuries from an (attainable) utopia of global knowledge into an awareness of the impossibility of global knowledge, but with the certainty of the local availability of the elements of this knowledge, no longer the project for a book, but a method of investigation addressing the general and omnivorous library of culture in its entirety, the Maximal Encyclopedia was envisaged in poetic terms by Dante, when, in Canto 33 of his Paradiso, as he finally attains the vision of God, he is unable to describe what he saw except, precisely, in terms of an encyclopedia:
In its profundity I saw—ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume—
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
substances, accidents, and dispositions
as if conjoined—in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary.
I think I saw the universal shape
which that knot takes; for, speaking this, I feel
a joy that is more ample. That one moment
brings more forgetfulness to me than twenty-
five centuries have brought to the endeavor
that startled Neptune with the Argo’s shadow!30
The encyclopedia is the only means we have of giving an account, not only of the workings of any semiotic system, but also of the life of a given culture as a system of interlocking semiotic systems.