Serendipities by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN009000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Linguistics, LIT004130, Literary Criticism/European/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Since we began by speaking of China, let us see what Kircher, insatiable in his lunatic curiosity, did with China. Egyptian was an original language, certainly more perfect than Hebrew and certainly more ancient, too. Why not look for other, more venerable linguistic ancestors?

Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Western world began to learn more about China, now visited not only by merchants and explorers, as in the days of Marco Polo. In 1569 the Dominican Gaspar da Cruz published a first description of Chinese writing (in his Tractado en quem se contan muito por extenso as cousas de la China), revealing that the ideograms did not represent sounds but things, or ideas of those things, to such an extent that they were understood by different peoples, including the Chinese, the Cochincinese, and the Japanese, even though these various peoples pronounced them in different ways. These revelations reappeared in a book by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza (Historia del gran reyno de la China, 1585), who repeated that even though different oriental peoples were speaking different languages they could understand one another by writing ideograms that represented the same ideas for all of them. When in 1615 the diaries of Father Matteo Ricci were published, those ideas became a matter of common knowledge, and one of the authors of the most important project for a universal philosophical language, John Wilkins, wrote in his Mercury (1641) that “though [peoples] of China and Japan doe as much differ in their language, as the Hebrew and the Dutch, yet either of them can, by this help of a common character as well understood the books and letters of the others, as if they were only their own.”5

The first European scholar to speak of a “universal character” was Francis Bacon (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, 1623, vi, 1), and, in order to prove its possibility, he cited Chinese writing. Curiously enough, neither Bacon nor Wilkins understood the iconic origin of ideograms, and both took them as purely conventional devices. In any case, the ideograms seemed to be endowed with the double property of being universal and also capable of establishing a direct contact between the character and the idea. The discovery of Chinese ideograms had an enormous influence on the development of the search for a universal philosophical language in Europe.

Fascinated as they were by reports of China, some thinkers discovered that Chinese imperial genealogies went further back in time than biblical ones. Thus Isaac de la Peyrère in 1655 (Systema Theologicum exprae-Adamitarum hypothesis) ventured the provocative hypothesis of a mankind prior to Adam. The whole of Hebrew and Christian sacred history (comprehending original sin and the mission of Jesus Christ) thus concerned only the Hebrew people but not the peoples of more ancient lands such as China. Needless to say, this hypothesis was considered heretical and did not enjoy great success, but it is worth recalling because it shows to what an extent China was increasingly seen as the land of an unknown wisdom.

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