Serendipities: Language And Lunacy [Paperback]

Please note: This book is approximately 75% paraphrased from Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language," which contains a more thorough treatment of the material that the two books share. The material that is new in this book is interesting, making the read worthwhile for the dedicated reader who has already enjoyed "The Search..". For the casual reader, "Serendipities" is much shorter and more accessible than "The Search for the Perfect Language", making it a suitable alternative or possibly an introduction to the longer text. However, if you take offense at paying to read the same information twice, simply do not purchase both books. Enjoy!

Serendipites is a collection of five essays where Eco is debating questions that arose from his preceding text - The search for the Perfect Language. His style here is to debate several intrinsic problems in history that are tied to language and how human reaction to them has shaped our thinking. The essays neither seek to advise or educate, only to debate without answer, other than to nudge the reader towards areas that are yet open to answers and you leave the five with a multitude of thoughts, conjectures.
The first essay - The Force of Falsity - gives rise to that scholarly need to provide polarity. Eco states that if there be a force of Truth, then surely, there must be an opposite force. He acknowledges the danger for understanding of falsity requires a kernel of truth to exist and that the real discourse is, rather, to prove that which claims authenticity, is in reality, that. The essay provides many canonical examples of where a belief which is incorrect - such as Ptolemy, Columbus, the Donation of Constantine and others - has led to a truth. Simply put, experience and thus knowledge, is often only obtained by theorizing and then practical trial and error. The driving force is merely proof of curiosity. Eco proves that serendipity is perhaps a separate force in itself but it is no great surprise because, without absolute knowledge, enlightenment must follow a path of conjecture and proof.
The second essay - Languages in Paradise - of the five has the greatest capacity for disagreement. Eco opens by stating that Adam was the Nomothete yet claims that his use of the name Eve "is evident that we are dealing with names that are not arbitrary". This effectively contradicts the concept that Adam was nomothete, as a name-giver ascribes name first and meaning is a resultant. Either Adam was nomothete or, if he was not, then the names he gave were intrinsically correct. They cannot be both. A further question arose in that perhaps we are newly attempting to reach a primal language rather than return to one - to create, if you wish, a nomothete when we have a single universal language. There is a further problem with Eco's usage of Dante's statement that: "only a man is able to speak". You only have to point to modern studies of Dolphins to realise that speech in whatever form communication may take, is not unique to man. Indeed, communication is not limited to the oral sense, but also encompasses the other four senses, at the very least. The bulk of the essay is given over to Dante's attempt to take the vernacular and compose the perfect language but there is some intense debate over his use of four words and variants thereof which fundamentally alter the meaning of his philosophy. You could argue that if Dante's meaning is so obscure then he can hardly be using a perfect language. Eco proceeds to analyse Dante's search to create the perfect language, to become a linguistic Adam. He comments on Dante's apparent reversal of theory of the perfection of Hebrew by Adam and his potential connections to Abulufia who espoused that each letter already possessed meaning.
The third essay - From Marco Polo to Leibiniz - speaks of the five possiblities resulting from cultural meetings, though the predominant would seem to be acculturation and uses Marco Polo to demonstrate that naming conventions are based on a cognitive understanding. He briefly touches on the development of phonograms (hieroglyphs the example - though there are more detailed books out there on the matter) and proceeds to the reconciliation of the antiquity of Chinese language with that of Hebrew, discussing at length Kirscher's work on such a reconciliation. Liebniz's later efforts on searching for such a utopian language highlights, according to Eco, where understanding attempts to fit the unknown to a pre-guessed condition. It is searching for similarities with the known, rather than researching the differences.
The fourth essay - The Language of the Austral Land - begins by examining how we have tried to find the perfect language and how we have developed our existing. The usual theory was that experience dictated language. Then this was reversed to suggest that language dictated our experiences which does tie in with the concept of Adam as nomothete. Eco spends considerable time contemplating the Foigny Austral land utopia whose communication is designed to provide philosophers as everything is based on the elements. There is a very detailed technical discussion on Foigny and Lull's and Wilkin's additions and development of such a priori philosophical language and commentary on Descartes' criticisms of it. Ultimately, we see that the attempt to create such perfect languages results in an understanding of how linguistic imperfection can create some our greatest literary works.
The fifth essay - The Linguistics of Joseph De Maistre - is concerned with mimologism and achieving a recognition of the decscent of language. Theories that each language is able to rectify its own inconsistences reflects back a primal source. As such Eco shows the four theses of how languages achieve this development and Maistre's conclusion that in order to be able to reason one must accept a linked network of the development of language and its associated ideals.
Serendipities is Eco at his semiotic best and, whilst he espouses it to be a footnote or appendix to `The Search for the Perfect Language', it is much more than that. Highly recommended.

Umberto Eco's large oeuvre can be divided into four groups: his scholarly work on semiotics, his amusing essays and plays on genre, his fiction, and his works for the mythical "general reader." This last group, to which Serendipities belongs, is the least effective and worthwhile, and this book is not a major contribution to that group.

Let's begin by assuming that you are interested in the history of language, intellectual history more generally, and/or the history of folly (or "lunacy," as Eco calls it). If none of these fit you, you won't probably like the book much; but let's assume you are so interested.

Serendipities is a group of five short essays about various oddities of European intellectual history as it relates to ideas about language. If you have read Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, this collection is a sort of addendum, unfortunately rather repetitive. If you haven't, you will probably have little context into which to fit these discussions of Athanasius Kircher's theory of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Leibniz's binary-mathematical interpretation of the Yi Ching, etc.

Assuming, however, that you have that context --- and note that we are now talking about a very narrow audience indeed! --- you will find a number of amusing bits of trivia, but little analytical depth. One has the sense that Eco is describing some little bits of things he stumbled on, which might be interesting to follow up but which are, for him, tangential or marginal.

The most valuable discussion in the book is the first chapter, which considers the problem of a history of folly. What are we to do when we encounter an extremely influential set of ideas based upon an entirely incorrect premise? For example, the Donation of Constantine, or the existence of Prester John's Christian Empire of the East, or the existence of the Rosicrucians, etc. --- all of these influential ideas are based upon some massive misrecognition, some completely erroneous interpretation of the authenticity of some text or texts. So how are we to interpret that historical influence?

It is an interesting and important question, closely allied to the problem of a history of magic or the occult. Unfortunately, Eco does not attempt a methodological solution, but rather places these ideas into their respective historical trajectories and points out how influential and odd are the conclusions drawn.

But so what? If you think it's great fun to expose the confusions of our intellectual ancestors, and have the background to understand specifically linuistic confusions of this sort, you might find this book enjoyable. For certain it is well written and charming, after all. But as for any conclusions, well, Eco doesn't draw them. As such, this is more or less a list of things which would ordinarily be found in footnotes to abstruse scholarly works. And without a serious and in-depth analysis, they should go back there.

If you are a big fan of Eco in all his genres, and thus have read and made sense of a good deal of his serious scholarly work (e.g. his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, or The Limits of Interpretation), you will probably want to add this to your collection. Otherwise this is not the place to start with Eco, and probably not the place to end either.