CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

''What is an idea?" Voltaire asked rhetorically in his Philosophical Dictionary. "It is an image painted in my brain ... ideas are nothing but the consequences of all the objects I have perceived .... I have ideas only because I have images." The idea as a representative image of the thing, this was the view everywhere accepted in the eighteenth century. Representation served as the foundation of all knowledge, while "observation", so much revered in any discussion of method, clarified the representation, enhancing the precision and accuracy of the reproduction. The foundation of language, however, and the awakening of reflective thought rested on the duplicated representation of the arbitrary sign. Whereas the representation fulfilled its purpose precisely to the extent that it provided an accurate reproduction of the thing, this duplicated representation was valued for its very artificiality, for its detach­ment. Its function could hardly have been more clearly expressed than in Bonnet's formulation, "the more indeterminate the sign, the more it is a sign; for it has greater representative capacity".

Through the artificiality of its assignation, the linguistic sign holds up the representation for further comparison,judgment, modification, generalization or specification. It provides the mind a vehicle by which to traverse its representations, and by this means activates the incisive edge of analysis: representations may be carved up, the elements examined, categorized and reassembled however the individual undertaking these procedures may wish. Language makes this possible. Representations are impressed upon us randomly and automatically, but signs permit us to make use of these repre­sentations, to gain knowledge of the world and ourselves, and to gain control of our circumstances.

Yet representations would remain nothing but discrete images, even with the support of language, were it not that they arise out of a world tightly interlaced, a harmonious whole, where the connections are there to be made out, not invented. This relational order is static: all relations, even the most indirect, are preexistent, unchanging, and entirely determinate. Bonnet does of course introduce change into the world of ontolOgical relations in the form of "world revolutions", but these events, too, are preformed and the picture remains static. Periodically they go off, like time-bombs set at the Creation,

144

L. Anderson, Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known© D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland 1982

CONCLUSION 145

and rearrange the entire relational order. What most fascinates Bonnet is the magnitude of each reordering. As he says, any taxonomy from an earlier period would be useless. Upon the surface of the earth, a new relational network or chain is inscribed. Were we ever in a position to survey the whole history of the world, it would appear like a stack of so many taxonomic tables.

At various points Bonnet's analyses become uncertain, begin to break down and tum into something else, and then are retrieved. As in a picture that discloses one thing in the line-work and another in the spaces, Bonnet occasionally saw an image leap out from the spaces, an apparition with which he did not know how to contend. Let us, for the moment, push the arbitrary sign and the relation a step further, as Ferdinand de Saussure did in reaching back to the eighteenth century and recovering the arbitrary sign,1 and trace this apparition. To Bonnet and his contemporaries,language was a nomencla­ture labeling the representations it could not but accept. The sign's "arbitrari­ness" extended only to the word chosen, not to the concept represented. To question the representation was the beginning of trouble. Thus it was so often said that we "create nothing" in thought, an avowal repeated even by those, like Bonnet, who believed in the active powers of the mind. Every idea had to be connected to the world; none could be allowed to spring autochthonous from the mind, for that put them all in doubt. In the discussion of relations, too, Bonnet clung to the notion that relations were grounded in essences, that things or beings had their "essential" properties from which relations derived and which they reflected. All things were joined through the relations holding between their "true natures." Beings cast their images in our senses, and we tried to uncover, in those representations, the essential properties and essential relations.

Saussure, however, redefmes the arbitrary sign to include both the signifier (word) and the signified (concept). He begins by allowing what posed only a problem and a boundary to eighteenth-century writers, when they saw it at all. If the sign includes the concept, then language has become something other than the naming of stable and preexistent things. Language organizes the world in the very process of articulating it. Concepts are arbitrary divisions within a linguistic system. Saussure no longer tries to assure himself that the signified stands, in some way, as the autonomous representation of essential, defining features of beings and objects in the world, or of their relationships to each other and to us. The signifieds are simply members of a system and are defmed by their relations to other members. These relations are not referred back to an exterior order; they are referred back only to the linguistic system itself.

146 CHAPTER VI

Bonnet was not entirely ignorant of this perspective. He did not exclude, from his reflections, an uncertainty about the representative accuracy of our thoughts, of our language, or of our classifications of nature. But he did not doubt that our mode of thought is anything other than representational, or that a fundamental relational order of things stood as the basis of all our apprehensions and misapprehensions.

Historians have failed to understand that the chain of beings was not presented by Bonnet as a description of the actual order of nature; rather, it served as a model or as a metaphor, useful for taxonomic purposes as a means of envisaging a configuration of all the relations binding together everything in the world. It was these relations that were foundational for him. It was their nature and scope that had to be understood, both among the objects of the world and among the objects of the mind, in order that some semblance of the interrelated whole might be grasped. Now, homologous to the chain-of­beings metaphor, binding the world of objects together in an organizational framework (ontological relations), the metaphor of the statue-man performed the same function with regard to the world of ideas (epistemological rela­tions). Both models made it possible to submit the interconnected whole to scrutiny - to the scissions of analysis and the recombinations of synthesis: that is, to the performance of logical operations and to the ordering of identities and differences across taxonomic tables. All of which shows the statue-man and the chain of beings as having emerged from a particular epistemological arrangement, and, with the context of contemporary philo­sophical concerns, to have been employed as useful devices.

Scanning the sites of our probes into Bonnet's texts, it may be observed that we have never departed from epistemological issues, that the nature of human understanding followed Bonnet through the construction of his taxonomy, through his speculations on language, education and personality, and dominated (as well as troubled) his thoughts on the relational order of the universe. But these issues, so obviously concerned with knOwing (and at times with the limits of reason), have been shown to be equally linked to language, and in particular to the natural-conventional system of signs. From Port-Royal to the end of the eighteenth century, language embodied ruled thought, displayed and disseminated order through its own "natural" means. Thanks to language there could exist beings distributed in taxonomies, rela­tions arranged into configurations and, in fact, representations of every kind unfolded into the linear sequence of sentences. Hence, despite the variety of topics we have considered under Bonnet's system of thought, it can now be seen that we have never really left the domain oflanguage. We apply signs

CONCLUSION 147

to the world of beings, to our world of thought, and by this means take con­trol of ourselves - in a world in which most creatures are tossed on a sea of sensations. We thereby fulfill the level of our present perfection, the dignity of our rank: a dignity that results from our ability to impose rational order(s), and an ability that is ours only because we speak.

How are we fmally to traverse and put into order all the relations of knowledge which, between the object and the idea, or again, between the most sensible ideas and the most abstract, circumscribe the dominion of representative thought? In the end, this must be done through language. The compositeness of representative images must always be separated - like the surface of a map, the parts of a clock, the organs of the body - into com­ponent units, relations of various kinds determined and judged, and then reassembled into another sort of unity: analytic and linear unity, which assembles the components into a sequential order where they are named, defined and remembered; where their various systems and relations are noted; where the unraveled whole is spread across sentences and paragraphs and pages, and rejoined piece by piece in the duplicated representation of discourse. We convert our ideas into books. Were our penetration greater we could do the same with the very movements of our sense fibers producing these images: "an intelligence capable of observing these movements in the brain could read them like a book". 2

And how, finally, do we address ourselves to the objects that have excited the representations by which, at second and third remove, we attempt to grasp the relations joining all things? But we have only the one procedure, and it is these relations we are trying to determine when we analyze our ideas. We attempt to reconstruct the harmonious whole from an already fractured image, for we have only discrete ideas, selected somewhat randomly by limited senses, from which to reconstitute reality's magnificent unity. In the end we again have recourse only to language and the method it has given, through which we examine the various characters of beings, rank them according to criteria of relative perfections, distribute the world of being -from the lowliest and least organized form of matter to the angels - across taxonomies in a single encyclopedic effort to incorporate everything, leaving no gaps, and hence record, by means of this exhaustive denomination, all the relations constituting universal harmony. Our efforts will of necessity remain partial.

I delight in envisaging the innumerable multitude of Worlds as so many books which, when collected together, compose the immense library of the Universe or the true

148 CHAPTER VI

Universal Encyclopedia. I conceive that the marvelous gradation that exists between these different worlds facilitates in superior intelligences, to whom it has been given to traverse or rather to read them, the acquisition of truths of every kind, which it encompasses, and instills in their understanding that order and that concatenation which are its principal beauty, and without which there is no true science. But these celestial Encyclopedists do not alI possess the Encyclopedia of the Universe to the same degree; some possess only a few branches of it, others possess a greater number, others grasp still more; but alI have eternity in which to increase and perfect their learning and develop alI their faculties. 3

In this fmal thought we see the great advantage of the personality that does not die. Its faculties develop and its learning increases forever.

The book of our representations, the universal encyclopedia of our being: knowledge is ordered according to the dictates, the "advantages" oflanguage. Not that language is prior to knowledge. They arise together: "It is by the same processes that one learns to speak and that one discovers either the principles of the world's system or those of the mind's operations, that is, all that is sublime in our knowledge."4 Nor do their interests differ. The focus of both is the analysis of representation: language unfolds the unitary representations; the reflective processes of understanding compare, judge and grasp the relations bared. It is an arrangement, as we have plainly seen, that takes in Bonnet's considerations on nature - his sceintific knowledge - as well. "This", Foucault claims,

is because it is of the very nature of science to enter into the system of verbal communi­cations, and of the very nature of language to be knowledge from its very fust word. Speaking, enlightening, and knowing are, in the strict sense of the term, of the same order. The interest shown by the Oassical age in science, the publicity accorded to its controversies, its extremely exoteric character, its opening up to the uninitiated, Fontenelle's popularization of astronomy, Voltaire reading Newton, alI this is doubtless nothing more than a sociological phenomenon. It did not provoke the slightest alteration in the history of thought, or modify the development of knowledge one jot. It explains nothing, except of course on the doxographic level where it should be situated; but its condition of possibility is nevertheless there, in that reciprocal kinship between knowl­edge and language.5

The system of Bonnet's thought thus comes together squarely within the eighteenth-century framework of problems, possibilities and solutions. If one is to understand what was meant by reason, in the "age of reason", the proper formulation appears to lie here: "Speaking, enlightening, knowing are ... of the same order." In which case the foregoing study of Bonnet's thought has been only a long reflection on that question; and if, to trace the

CONCLUSION 149

boundaries and locus of reason, it had to be followed through the distribution of organized beings, the structure of personality, the operations of reflective thought, and into the heritage and control of thought dispensed in education and made possible through the gift of language, we looked for it only in the same places it was sought and delivered up in that period. What reason had to do with, specifically, was order. It had to do with the establishment of an order of ruled thought and with the determination of an order of the relations of being. One hoped, in the eighteenth century, to ascertain the actual order of things, the natural order. But one expected, at least to be able to establish an order. For as rational, speaking beings, ordering was the prerogative and the duty of our station.

NOTES

1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966). :1 Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, "Introduction", 2. 3 Contemplation, part IV, Chapter XIII, note 1. 4 Antoine Louis Qaude Destutt de Tracy, Elements d'ideologie, reprint (Paris, 1970), 1,24. . 5 Foucault, The Order o/Things, 88-89.