From the Tree to the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF

in the fields of botany, mineralogy, zoology, hydrography, and mythology, once attributed to Aristotle, can be assigned to Hellenistic circles of the third century B.C. Finally, we may speak of specialized encyclopedias in the case of later geographical compendia such as Pomponius Mela’s De situ orbis (first century A.D. ), Aelian’s De natura animalium (second / third century) or the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (second / third century).
    But there is a line between the compendia of curious facts and erudite digressions (like the Noctes Atticae, composed by Aulus Gellius in the second century A.D. , or specialized encyclopedias such as Pomponius Mela’s) and an encyclopedia in the global and organic sense of the word, a work that aspires in other words to be an exhaustive catalogue of existing knowledge.
    The Hellenistic world assigned the role that Roman and medieval scholars would eventually assign to the encyclopedia, not to a single volume that deals with everything, but to a collection of all existing volumes, the library, as well as to a collection of all things possible, the museum. The museum and library built in Alexandria by Ptolemy I (said to have held, depending on the period, between 500,000 and 700,000 volumes) formed the nucleus of a veritable university, a center for the collection, research, and transmission of knowledge.
    The encyclopedic attitude took shape instead in Roman circles, in which the whole of Greek knowledge was gathered together, in a labor of appropriation of the patrimony of that Graecia capta which ferum victorem cepit. 17 An early example is the Rerum divinarum et humanarum antiquitates of Terentius Varro (first century B.C. ), of which only fragments have survived, which dealt with history, grammar, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, agriculture, law, rhetoric, the arts, literature, the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, the history of the gods. We do possess, however, the 37 books of Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (first century A.D. , approximately 20,000 facts cited and 500 authors consulted), devoted to the heavens and the universe in general, the various countries of the world, prodigious births and burials, the earth’s fauna, creatures of the deep, birds, insects, vegetables, medicines derived from vegetable and animal sources, metals, painting, precious stones and gems.
    At first sight, Pliny’s work appears to be a mere confused jumble of facts, with no structure, but, if we turn our attention to the immense index, we realize that the work begins in fact with the heavens, going on to deal with geography, demography, and ethnography, followed by anthropology and human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, gardening, natural pharmacology, medicine, and magic, before proceeding to mineralogy, architecture, and the plastic arts—setting up a sort of hierarchy proceeding from the original to the derivative, from the natural to the artificial—according to the arborescent structure illustrated in Figure 1.11 .

    Figure 1.11

    This aspect should also be borne in mind for what we will have to say about subsequent encyclopedias. An encyclopedia always relies for its organization on a tree—whose model is invariably, on a more or less conscious level, that of the binary subdivision of a Porphyrian tree. But the difference between the Arbor Porphyriana and the encyclopedic tree (which amounts, openly or in a dissimulated fashion, to a table of contents) is that the Porphyrian tree claims to use the terms of its disjunctions as primitives, not susceptible of further definition, and at the same time indispensable for defining something else, while in the encyclopedic index each node is referred to the notions that define it and will be presented in the course of the overall discussion. And in this sense classifications like those of the natural sciences also have or can assume the role of an index.
    This difference is fundamental to an