From the Tree to the Labyrinth

12

The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre

In the story of the centuries-old search for a perfect language, a central chapter must be devoted to the rediscovery of a series of matrix languages or of a primordial mother tongue. For many centuries, the leading claimant for the position of mother tongue was Hebrew. Subsequently, other candidates would appear upon the scene (even Chinese, for example), but finally the search would lose its utopian fervor and its mystical tension as the science of linguistics was born and, with it, the Indo-European hypothesis (see Eco 1993: ch. 5).

For a long time, though, the idea of a primigenial language not only had a historical significance (rediscovering the speech of all mankind before the confusion of Babel) but also a semantic one. In fact, this primigenial language was supposed to incorporate a natural relationship between words and things. The primigenial language also had revelatory value for, in speaking it, the speaker would recognize the nature of the named reality. This tendency, which Genette (1976) has called “mimologism,” has an ancient and distinguished ancestry in Western tradition, its prime example being the Cratylus of Plato. The idea—already contested in the two previous centuries through the hypotheses known as Epicurean and polygenetic—underwent a crisis in what Rosiello (1976) would have called “the linguistic of enlightenment.” But this crisis occurred at the level of the official (which is another way of saying victorious) philosophical and linguistic culture, and the notion survived in many mystical and philosophical trends and has resurfaced even today in the work of those whom the nineteenth-century French tradition had begun calling les fous du langage.

I am indebted to Andrew White (1917: 2:189–208) for some suggestions on the way the mystical version of the monogenetic hypothesis was prolonged in the theosophical ambience of the late eighteenth century (in Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, De l’esprit des choses, for example) and among the French Catholic legitimists such as De Bonald (Recherches philosophiques, III, 2) and Lamennais (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion). White also quotes Joseph de Maistre, an alluring clue, because Maistre represents a fusion of the themes of classic legitimism (of which he can be considered the initiator) and those of the theosophism hovering in the circles of Scottish and Templar masonry to which Maistre had at first belonged, though he broke with them for reasons of religious orthodoxy (reaffirming the authority of the Church and the pope against that of any clique of Illuminati).

In a debate on the subject, Raffaele Simone suggested that much of the search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words an expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly disappointed. This is certainly true. In the legitimist tradition, the assertion of the sacrality of language aims not so much at reconstructing a primigenial language as at rediscovering the traces of our natural languages. The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all the Epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.

Since it is linguistically difficult to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things (not least because of the plurality of languages), the way followed by the monogeneticists does not differ much from that of the most fanciful etymologists of the past, Isidore of Seville at their head. The fact that many of these etymologies also reappear in some contemporary thought (in Heidegger, for example) only indicates the toughness of the dream, or perhaps an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.

If we take a look at the text in which Maistre discussed at greatest length the nature of languages, his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, we see that the first declarations simply repropose what is found even today among authors who hark back to tradition as the source of all knowledge, opposing the degenerate learning of a secularized culture, “modern,” “enlightened,” or “scientistic.”

Listen to what wise antiquity has to say about the first men; it will tell you that they were marvelous men, and that beings of a superior order deigned to favor them with the most precious communications. On this point there is no discord: initiates, philosophers, poets, history, fable, Asia and Europe, speak with one voice. Such agreement of reason, revelation, and every human tradition forms a demonstration that cannot be contradicted. So not only did men begin with science, but with a science different from our own, and superior to our own because it had a higher origin, which is what made it more dangerous. And this explains why science was always considered mysterious in principle, and why it was always confined to the temples, where the flame finally burned out when it could serve no purpose but to burn. (Second Dialogue 41)

But just when readers might expect proof of this theory, they always find themselves confronted by inconsistent, circular arguments. Maistre recalls that Julian the Apostate in one of his discourses called the sun “the seven-rayed god,” and he wonders where the emperor found such a singular attribute. His answer is that the idea could have come to him only from the ancient Asiatic tradition to which he recurred in his theurgic renovation. Maistre cites, for example, “the sacred books of India,” which speak of seven virgins gathered to celebrate the advent of Krishna when the god suddenly appears to them, inviting them to dance. When the virgins object that they have no dancing partners, the god divides into seven, giving each virgin her own Krishna.

There is really nothing so strange about Julian’s choice of imagery, inasmuch as the hebdomad, the mystique of the number seven, is found in many ancient cultures, and Julian could have absorbed it either from Indian sources or from others. But what indicates a strange disjuncture of thought is the series of examples that follows hard upon Maistre’s evocation of Julian. First of all, he notes, the “true” system of the universe was known from most remote antiquity, as is shown by the pyramids of Egypt, which are rigorously oriented according to astronomical criteria. Then, whether as proof or consequence of this fact, we observe that a people like the Egyptians, who could create colors that have lasted thirty centuries, raise boulders against every law of mechanics to a height of six hundred feet, carve in granite birds of all known species, could hardly fail to excel in every other art, and therefore they must have known things of which we are ignorant. Finally, in Asia, consider the ancient astronomical observations carved on the walls of Nimrud, which rose on land still damp from the Flood. All this drives one—notice the conclusion—to ask oneself, “So where will we place the so-called times of barbarism and ignorance?” (42).

We cannot see a direct rapport between the metaphor of the seven rays and the pyramids, unless it is to be found in the fact that different myths and archetypes tried to explain astronomical phenomena and furnished a pre-Galilean version of a world written in mathematical characters. But to confirm the existence of these trends Plato would again suffice, with his Timaeus. If anything, it is the knowledge that even more ancient images circulated in African and Asian culture that explains why Julian followed this tradition. Whether he followed it or revitalized it, however, this does not show that he was its direct and authorized heir or that the tradition spoke any truth.

But this reasoning had been typical of the same Masonic tradition that influenced Maistre: the fact that an association decided to hark back to the Templar tradition became a sign of direct descent.

It is obvious that in this reasoning there is no linguistic-etymological discovery, but only biased polemic against sick modern civilization: “Under skimpy northern dress, his head lost in the curls of deceptive locks, his arms loaded with books and instruments of all kinds, pale from long nights and work, the modern scientist drags himself along the road to truth, soiled with ink and panting, always bending his algebra-furrowed brow towards the earth” (43). Compared to that of our modern civilization, the knowledge of the origins reveals its obvious superiority:

In so far as it is possible to perceive the science of early times at such a distance, one always see it free and isolated, soaring rather than walking, and presenting in its whole being something airy and supernatural. Exposing to the winds the hair that escapes from an oriental mitre, an efod covering a breast uplifted with inspiration, it looked only to the heavens, and its disdainful foot seemed to touch the earth only to leave it. However, although it demanded nothing of anyone and seemed to know no human support, it is no less proven that it possessed the rarest knowledge. (43)

The proof of this primacy would lie in the fact that traditional science was exempted from the task imposed on modern science, while all the calculations that we base on experimentation are the most false that can be imagined. Whence we see that the thesis (modern civilization is inferior to ancient civilization) is reasserted as proof.

At this point the Greek myth of the golden age is proposed as proof that the state of perfect and luminous knowledge existed only in the civilizations of the origins (44). Thus the man who had written pages, truly beautiful from a literary point of view, on the revolution’s crime, rediscovers the root of every Jacobin degradation in the act (so remote that it can no longer be collocated in history) with which language fell away from the original tree (44).

Seekers after original Hebrew, even they could retrace its origin only into a past Eden (of which they had to make an effort, moreover, to offer, however fancifully, a chronology) did not therefore refrain from reconstructing its grammar. Compared with the efforts of a man such as Athanasius Kircher to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and study the generating of alphabets, the efforts of Maistre seem fairly puerile: “Here is the mystery, gentlemen: one generation said ba, the other said be; the Assyrians invented the nominative, and the Medes, the genitive” (116)—which, if anything, would be proof not of a divine origin of languages but precisely of their slow evolution. Maistre asks himself why, in the languages of the ancient peoples, we find reflections of knowledge that those people could not have possessed. The correct question naturally would not be “why” but “whether.” In fact, Maistre goes on to illustrate not inconceivable knowledge but proofs of the fact, common among ancients as among moderns, that poets are capable of finding ingenious metaphors to name phenomena fundamental to human experience.

For example, from where did the Greeks, at least three thousand years ago, take the epithet Physizoos (giving or possessing life), which Homer sometimes gives to the earth? Or that of Pheresbios, very nearly synonymous, which he attributes to Hesiod? From where did they take the still more singular epithet of Philemate (amorous or thirsty for blood), given to the earth in a tragedy? Who would have taught them to call sulphur, which is the cipher of fire, the divine? I am no less struck by the name Cosmos given to the world. The Greeks named it beauty because all order is beauty, as the good Eustathius said somehere, and supreme order is in the world. The Latins encountered the same idea and expressed it by their word Mundus, which we have adopted by merely giving it a French ending, except however that one of these words excludes disorder and the other excludes defilement. Nevertheless it is the same idea, and the two words are equally correct and equally false. But again tell me, I ask you, how these ancient Latins, when they still knew only war and ploughing, thought to express by the same word ideas of prayer and torture? And who taught them to call fever the purifier or the expiator? We would not say that there is here a real knowledge of cause by which a people affirmed the correctness of a name. But do you believe that these sorts of judgment could have belonged to a time when they scarcely knew how to write, when the dictator spaded his own garden, when they wrote verses that Varro and Cicero no longer understood? These words and still others that could be cited, and that belong completely to oriental metaphysics, are the evident debris of more ancient languages destroyed or forgotten. (48–49)

Here we are simply demonstrating that every epoch had its poets, capable of naming things in an unusual and perspicacious fashion. Or, at most, we are repeating, in a simplified form, a thesis inspired by Vico on the metaphoric origin of language that is, if anything, a reflection of the perceptive freshness of ancient peoples, not of their presumed occult knowledge. It hardly seems that any profound learning was necessary for agrarian peoples to call the earth “life-giving” as they lived, in fact, on the earth’s fruits.

Maistre was a vigorous thinker, capable of historically based critical judgments (it suffices to look at his contestations of the Templar myth of the Scottish masonry). And he was not ignorant of the attempts made to construct an a priori philosophical language, from Bacon to Wilkins and beyond. He perceives the contrivances of the artificial languages proposed in the course of the previous two centuries, to which common sense would reply that natural languages seem more flexible in handling our experience. But then this position (which, thus enunciated, would prove disastrously “enlightened”) in Maistre’s discourse is radically transformed. To demonstrate the agility of natural languages Maistre cannot avoid recurring to another notion, born in the eighteenth century: that of the “genius” of languages. But the notion of genius recalls that of polygenesis, or at least of autonomous development, unreconcilable with any monogenetic hypothesis. Maistre thus finds himself entangled in a line of reasoning that leads to wild paralogisms:

I do not want to take up the question of the origins of language (the same, it must be noted in passing, as that of innate ideas), in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples, but what I can assure you of, for nothing is clearer, is the prodigious talent of infant peoples in forming words and of the absolute incapacity of philosophers to do the same thing. I recall that Plato, in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples. What is remarkable about this is that it has been said they proceeded by way of deliberation, in virtue of a determined system of agreement, although such a thing would have been rigorously impossible in every respect. Each language has its genius, and this genius is ONE, in a way that excludes all idea of composition, or arbitrary formation, or anterior convention. (49)

The notion of genius does not exclude convention, unless the former is understood as a kind of mystical insufflation that comes from outside the linguistic formative process. Maistre decides to isolate the “genius” specific to Greek and to Latin in some morphological characteristics of the two languages, an admissible method, without making any decision as to the precision of the analysis. Thus he observes that in Greek compound words can be formed in which the two parts generate a second meaning, without therewith becoming unrecognizable, whereas Latin tends to shatter the words in such a way that from their fragments, chosen and joined through some unknown and quite singular agglutinations, are born new words of surprising beauty, whose elements are no longer recognizable except to a trained eye (49). But here is the proof:

From these three words, for example, CAro DAta VERmibus they made CADAVER, flesh abandoned to the worms. From the words MAgis and voLO, NOn and voLO, they made MALO and NOLO, two excellent verbs that every language, even Greek, might envy Latin.… The French are not absolutely unacquainted this system. Those who were our ancestors, for example, knew very well how to name theirs by a partial union of the word ANCIien with ÊTRE, just as they made beffroi from Bel EFFROI. See how they worked with the two Latin words DUo and IRE, from which they made DUIRE, going two together, and by a very natural extension, mener, conduire. From the personal pronoun SE, from the relative adverb of place HORS, and the verbal ending TIR, they made S-OR-TIR, that is to say SEHORSTIR, or to put one’s person outside the place where it was, which appears marvelous to me. (49–50)

This passage displays two contradictions. In the first part, the fact that two languages evolved through different morphological rules is, if anything (as we have said), an argument against monogenetism. In the second part, with a specific quotation from Isidore, Maistre tries to play the etymological card. But at least the etymology of the seventeenth-century monogeneticists consisted of showing how the words of each language had developed from a single Hebrew root (the only one, for that matter, to have a presumed “iconic” or motivated relationship with the thing signified). Here, on the contrary, the game consists of demonstrating that within each language, and with quite different mechanisms, compound words can be created whose meanings are born from the sum of the meanings of their simple components, which is what happens in the natural languages when they compose terms like screwdriver, corkscrew, parasol, or when spontaneous agglutinations are born, as in the transformation of Mediolanum into Milan—though, alas, this never happened with the Latin word cadaver. Even if Isidore’s etymology of cadaver were plausible, and even if had the etymology attributed to it by Maistre, this would in no way prove any iconic and motivated relation between simple words and signified reality but rather, if anything, that new coinages are often born from the wordplay typical of the rhetors of decadence and not from an instinctive folk wisdom.

The fact that this aspect could escape Maistre is explained only by the religious—and not linguistic—exigency that he convince his readers (almost pedagogically) that language says originally the Truth. And we sense this from some expressions of outright joy with which he glimpses the action, within every human language, of this impulse to tell always the truth, no matter what: “It is a pleasure to be present, so to speak, at the work of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes you see it struggling against some difficulty that impedes its development: it searches a form that it lacks; its materials resist it; then it will extricate itself from its embarrassment with a happy solecism, and it will say very effectively, ‘Rue passante,’ ‘couleur voyante’ ‘place marchande’ ‘métal cassant,’ etc.” (51).

No objection would be made as to the efficacy of these compounds, were it not for the fact that Maistre is not always fond of compounds (or of the hidden action a language forms in order to mint them), as if a language, in some of its vicissitudes, remained faithful to its own obligation to truth and in other instances degenerated. As examples of degeneration, he cites the fact that already in his own day (and in the St. Petersburg familiar to him) on visiting cards one could find titles such as Minister, Général, Kammerherr, Fräulein, Général-Anchef, Général-Dejourneí, Joustizii-Minister, and that on commercial posters words like magazei, fabrica, meubel, or that in the course of military drills commands were heard such as directii na prava, na leva, deployade en échiquier, en echelon, contre-marche, or that in the army functions should be named haupt-wacht, exercise hause, ordonnance-hause, commisariat, cazarma, canzellari.

Immediately afterward, he mentions terms considered “beautiful, elegant, and expressive” that presumably existed in “your primitive language”: souproug (bridegroom), which precisely means “he who is attached with another to a single yoke,” and he comments that “nothing more correct or more inspired” could have been found, just as “we must admit that the savages or the barbarians who once deliberated to form such nouns surely did not lack refinement” (52).

It is obvious that there is no reason (except the imponderable one of taste) to decide that place marchande is legitimate and contremarche is not. It is unclear why to describe the bridegroom as someone attached to the same yoke (which could be simply a carnival taunt) seems beautiful, whereas it is horrible to give an order for an army to deploy itself like a chessboard (an effective spatial metaphor). Perhaps here Maistre laments only the introduction of barbarisms and therefore the pollution of one language with terms borrowed from another. In any case, he seems to react according to his personal stylistic preferences, “by ear.”

The point is that, if language must be considered the only way to enter into a rapport with the Sacred, every etymology must be “good”; in every metaphor, even the most banal, there should shine a truth, even in screwdriver. Since rue passante is not ancient to belong to the golden age, in recognizing it as an undegenerate expression Maistre is simply privileging the freshness of popular language over that of bureaucratic language. If he were to trace these and other discriminants, he would shift from mystical linguistics to sociolinguistics, an intention that is very far from his mind.

In fact, he returns constantly to the idea that the perfect language is that of the origins:

The formation of the most perfect, the most meaningful, the most philosophic words, in the full force of the term, invariably belongs to the time of ignorance and simplicity. One must add, to complete this great theory, that similarly the name-making talent invariably disappears in the measure that one descends to the epochs of civilization and science. In all the writings of our time on this interesting question, there has been a continuously expressed wish for a philosophic language, but without anyone knowing or even suspecting that the most philosophic language is that in which philosophy is least involved. Two little things are lacking to philosophy to create words: the intelligence to invent them and the power to get them adopted. If it sees a new object, it pages through its dictionaries to find an antique or foreign word, and almost always it turns out badly. The word montgolfière, for example, which is national, is correct, at least in one sense, and I prefer it to aréostat, which is the scientific term and which says nothing. One might as well call a ship a hydrostat. See this crowd of new words borrowed from the Greek this past twenty years, as crime or folly has found the need: almost all have been taken or formed in a way that is contrary to their literal meaning. The word théophilanthrope, for example, is more foolish than the thing, which is to say a lot: an English or German schoolboy would have known how to say, on the contrary, théanthrophile. You tell me that this word was invented by wretches in a wretched period; but chemical nomenclature, which was certainly the work of very enlightened men, begins with a solecism of the worst sort, oxygène instead of oxygone. Moreover, although I am not a chemist, I have excellent reasons to think that this whole dictionary will be effaced; but merely looking at the matter from the philological and grammatical point of view, it would be perhaps the most unfortunate thing imaginable if the recently disputed metric nomenclature did not win the all-time award for barbarism. (56–57)

Why should oxygen be more unhappy than the very unhappy oxygon? This is what Maistre does not explain. If language is seen as what the world was for the Middle Ages, as a natural revelation of Truth, nothing in language should be wrong. As medieval thinkers said, even monsters should show the power of God. Furthermore, as Maistre is the first to assert, in language there is a glottogonic force that overcomes all human resistance (and hence language is always right).

It must, however, be said that, at least in one case, Maistre’s reasoning finds a logically plausible formulation. He seeks, in effect, to distinguish three concepts: (1) the historical paternity through which every language derives from another, all tracing their ancestry back to the same, primigenial source; (2) the autonomous force whereby every language develops its own genius, and (3) the presence within each language of a “superlinguistic” force, a sort of divinely bestowed energheia that causes, within each language, without necessarily any historical descendance or borrowing, the same miracle of the primordial language to take place. Thus the following passage becomes comprehensible, as it denies thesis 1 in the first paragraph and affirms thesis 2 in the second:

And what can we say of the surprising analogies that can be noticed between languages separated by time and space to the point of never having been able to influence each other?

1. Please notice that I am not to be understood to be speaking of simple conformities of words acquired simply by way of contact or communication;

2. I speak only of conformities of ideas, proved by synonyms of sense, totally different in form, which excludes all idea of borrowing. I will only have you notice one very singular thing, which is that when it is a question of rendering some of those ideas whose natural expression would in some way offend delicacy, the French often chanced upon the same turns of phrase formerly employed by the Greeks in their day to save these shocking naïvetés, that must appear quite extraordinary since in this regard we acted on our own without asking anything of our intermediaries, the Latins. (52, my emphasis)

But after the assertion that every language resolves its own problems by itself, thesis 3 emerges, which sets out to prove that it is no longer a language’s autonomy but rather the existence of an original and divine force, the word, that becomes the source of every language.

If, on this point of the origin of language, as on so many others, our century has missed the truth, it is because it has a mortal fear of meeting it. Languages began, but the word never, and not even with man. The one has necessarily preceded the other, since the word is possible only through the VERB [i.e., the Word of God]. Every particular language comes into being like an animal, by birth and development, so that man never passed from a state of voicelessness to the use of the word. He has always spoken, and it is with sublime reason that the Hebrews called him a TALKING SOUL. (54)

But then, immediately afterward, and without a break, thesis 1, rejected in the first paragraph, is reproposed:

When a new language takes form, it is born in the midst of a society that is in the full possession of language; and the action or the principle that presides at this formation cannot arbitrarily invent one word. It uses those it finds around it or that it calls from farther away; it nourishes itself on them, it chews them, it digests them, and it never adopts them without modifying them to some degree. (54, my emphasis)

Finally, to underline the (always good) naturalness with which each single language, grinding or digesting previous elements, forms always suitable words, there is a gloss: “In a century passionate for every gross expression excluding order and intelligence, they have talked a lot about arbitrary symbols; but there are no arbitrary symbols, every word having its reason” (54). This negates what was previously asserted, namely, that having invented oxygen was a sign of degeneration. In fact, Maistre is biased: he thinks (from the beginning) that the modern inventors of oxygen were degenerate (inasmuch as they were modern), while the ancient inventors of cadaver were right (inasmuch as they were ancient). He is not seized by the suspicion that not even the ancient inventors of cadaver were the original Name Giver.

However, we also accept the proposition according to which languages live on borrowings; they transform and adapt, and yet their every word is natural and motivated. If Maistre returned to his example of rue passante, he would find that there is a motivation for the compound, but he would not be able to explain the motivation of rue and of passer, unless he repeated all the contortions of the classic etymologists. Thus, arriving at the crucial point, he gives up. Or, rather, he probably believes that he is not giving up, if the following passage is the expected demonstration. But the total mutual contradiction of the provided examples forces us—in the interest of the reader—to mark within the passage the various theses (all in disagreement among themselves) that it demonstrates. In our view, the theses are the following:

1. Thesis of obscure borrowing. Sometimes in a language there existed a word that then somehow passed into another language, which abandoned it but passed it on to a local dialect; for this reason, we may find in an Alpine locality a word used today in the Slavic area. This thesis, however, does not explain why words must reflect the nature of things, nor does it say that they do reflect it.

2. Thesis of autonomous invention. Sometimes a word is invented by analogy with a foreign term, sometimes by metaphor. Then each language invents its own terms and does so following quite different criteria.

3. Thesis of original iconism. A language does not invent words; it finds them already made, in accord with nature. (No proofs follow.)

4. Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing. One language borrows words from different languages, for the widest variety of reasons.

This is how, without a break, four mutually incompatible theses are affirmed.

[Thesis of obscure borrowing] Perhaps you will remember that in that country French son (in Latin furfur) is called Bren. On the other side of the Alps an owl is called Sava. If someone were to ask you why the two peoples have chosen these two arrangements of sound to express these two ideas, you would have been tempted to reply: Because they judged it appropriate; things of this sort are arbitrary. However you would have been in error; for the first of those two words is English and the second is Slavic; and from Ragusa to Kamchatka the word is used to signify in the beautiful Russian language what it signifies eight hundred leagues from here in a purely local dialect. You will not be tempted, I hope, to tell me that men deliberating on the Thames, on the Rhine, on the Obi, or on the Po, would by chance come across the same sounds to express the same ideas. Therefore the two words already pre-existed in the two languages that presented them to the two dialects. Would you like to think that the four peoples received them from some previous people? I know nothing of it, but I admit, it: in the first place it is the consequence of the fact that these two immense families, the Teutonic and the Slavic, did not arbitrarily invent these two words, but that they received them. Then the question begins again with respect to earlier nations. Where did they get them? One must answer in the same way, they received them; and so one goes back to the origin of things. (54–55)

[Thesis of autonomous invention] The candles that are being carried in at the moment remind me of their name: at one time the French carried on a great commerce with the city of Botzia in the Kingdom of Fez; they brought from there a great quantity of wax candles that they took to naming botzies. Soon the national genius shaped this word and made bougies of it. The English retained the old expression wax-candle, and the Germans prefer to say wachslicht (light of wax); but everywhere you see the cause that determined the word. Even if I had not run across the etymology of bougie in the preface of Thomassin’s Hebrew dictionary, where I certainly would never have looked for it, would I have been less sure of some such etymology? To be in doubt on such a matter, one would have to extinguish the flame of analogy, which is to say one would have to renounce reasoning. (55)

[Thesis of original iconism] Notice, if you will, that the very word etymology is already a great proof of the prodigious talent of antiquity to run across or adopt the most perfect words, for it presupposes that each word is true, which is to say that it is not imagined arbitrarily—which is enough to lead a good mind a long way. Because of induction, what one knows in this genre demonstrates a great deal about other cases. What one does not know, on the contrary, proves nothing except the ignorance of the one who is looking. An arbitrary sound never expresses and can never express an idea. As thought necessarily exists prior to words, which are only the physical symbols of thought, words, in their turn, exist prior to the formation of every new language, which receives them ready-made and then modifies them to its own taste. Like an animal, the genius of each language hunts every source to find what suits it. (55–56)

[Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing] In our language, for example, maison is Celtic, palais is Latin, basilique is Greek, honnir is Teutonic, rabot is Slavic, almanach is Arab, and sopha is Hebrew. Where does all this take us? It matters little to me, at least at the moment: it suffices for me to prove to you that languages are only formed from other languages, which they usually kill to nourish themselves, in the manner of carnivorous animals. (56)

The passage concludes: “So let us never speak of chance or of arbitrary symbols” (56). Yet, on the contrary, all the arguments that have gone before seem to militate in favor of a supreme arbitrariness of decisions on the part of the languages. And we are puzzled by the question “Where does all this take us?” which insinuates the idea of a deep source of words. We have just been told where they come from: Celtic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew.

We have said that the four theses contemporaneously enunciated are not compatible. We will be more specific: all together, they are not compatible with a strong idea of the birth and development of languages, but they would be compatible if we admitted that languages are a historical-cultural phenomenon, that they grow without an order decided by a supernatural will, and that they gradually arrive at their stability through borrowings (deliberate or unconscious), poetic inventions, conventional whims, and “iconic” attempts. But in this case languages would achieve their organic condition just as, from an evolutionist perspective devoid of any idea of providence, only giraffes would survive in certain conditions because they have the longest necks.

This is what Maistre cannot accept. And this is how he then concludes his linguistic excursus: with a series of thoughts, each of them perhaps acceptable, though when taken all together they seem a fireworks display of non sequiturs.

Or, if you would like me to employ another turn of phrase, the word is eternal, and every language is as old as the people who speak it. Some, without reflection, might object that there is no nation that can understand its ancient language—but what, I ask you, does it matter? Do alterations that do not touch principle exclude identity? Would someone who had seen me in my cradle recognize me today? However I think I have the right to say that I am the same. It is no different with language: it is the same as long as the people is the same. The poverty of languages in their beginnings is another assumption made with the full power and authority of philosophy. New words prove nothing, since in the measure that they are acquired others are lost, in who knows what proportions. What is sure is that people have always spoken and they have spoken precisely as they have thought and as well as they have thought, for it is equal foolishness to believe that there is a symbol for a thought that does not exist as to imagine that a thought exists without a symbol to express it. (57–58)

It is true that the Soirées record conversations, but surely in this philosophical dialogue Maistre did not wish to give the impression of inconclusive chatter. The lack of conclusion, the iron chain of non sequiturs, reveals a method, not an interlocutory lapse.

For that matter, Maistre himself said as much. Look again at the passage entitled Thesis of autonomous invention, and you will see that, in order to believe in etymologies, the “flame of analogy” (56) must not be extinguished, reasoning must not be renounced. This is Maistre’s idea of Reason: to reason means to entrust oneself to any analogy that establishes an unbroken network of contacts between every thing and every other thing. This can be said, and it must be done, because it has been assumed that this network has existed since the Origin; indeed it is itself the basis of all knowledge.

It is typical of reactionary thought to establish a double equation, between Truth and Origin and between Origin and Language. The Thought of Tradition serves only to confirm a mystical belief that arrests any further reasoning.

This translation is a minimally revised version of the translation by William Weaver that appeared in Eco (1998b). The quotations are here given in the version contained in “The Saint Petersburg Dialogues” in Lebrun (1993).