sister like his watch, and his friend like his dog. He is unconscious of his sex and his species;
men and women are alike unknown” (p. 256) [p. 18o].
Part II: Chapter 4
1.”It has often occurred to me in skeptical moments not only that Homer knew how to write,
but that he wrote in the manner of his time. I am very sorry if this doubt is formally
contradicted by the story of Bellerophon in the Iliad” [p. 23]. Subsequently engaged in
denying the significance, that is to say the authenticity, of the Bellerophon episode, Rousseau
pays no attention to its meaning: that the only piece of writing in Homer was a letter of death.
Bellerophon unwittingly carried on himself the inscription of his own death sentence. Within
an infinite chain of representations, desire carries death via the detour of writing. “Beautiful
Anteia the wife of Proitos was stricken/With [illicit] passion to lie in love with him
[Bellerophon, Glaucus’ son].” Unsucccessful, she threatens her husband: “Would you be
killed, O Proitos? Then murder Bellerophontes/ Who tried to lie with me in love, though I was
unwilling.” The king, representing Anteia’s desire, dare not kill with his own hands. He does
dare to write, and deferring murder, he traces with his hand “in a folding tablet” in
“murderous symbols” (thymophthora—[”passion-wasting”]) [the passages from the Iliad are
taken from the Richmond Lattimore translation (Chicago, 1951), p. 157.] He sends
Bellerophon to Lycea, charging him with these “fatal signs.” Reading this message, illegible
to Bellerophon, Proitos’s father-in-law, reigning at Lycea, will understand that it speaks of
putting the carrier of these “symbols” to death. In his turn, he defers the murder, sends
Bellerophon to risk death through killing the invincible Chimaera or the famous Solymes, and
lays ambushes for him. To no end. He finishes by giving him his daughter. Later, Bellerophon
is no longer loved by the gods and he goes alone, wandering “the plain of Aleios, eating his
heart out, skulking aside from the trodden track of humanity” (Lattimore, pp. 157—58)
2.Vico says that he understood the origin of languages at the moment when, after many
difficulties, it appeared to him that the first nations “were nations of poets; by the same
principles, we first identified the true origin of languages” (Scienza Nuova, I: 174). The
distinction among three languages would correspond, mutatis mutandis, to Rousseau’s
schema; the second language, which marks the appearance of both speech and metaphor,
would, strictly speaking, be the moment of origin, when the poetic song is not yet broken into
articulation and convention. Let us compare: “Three kinds of language were spoken which
compose the vocabulary of this Science: (1 ) that of the time of the families when gentile men
were newly received into humanity. This, we shall find, was a mute language of signs and
physical objects having natural relations to the ideas they wished to express. (2) That spoken
by means of heroic emblems, or similitudes, comparisons, images, metaphors, and natural
descriptions, which make up the great body of the heroic language which was spoken at the
time the heroes reigned. (3) Human language using words agreed upon by the people, a
language of which they are absolute lords” (3, 1, p. 32) [Bergin, op. cit., p. 18]. Elsewhere:
“That first language ... was not a language in accord with the nature of the things it dealt with
. . . but was a fantastic speech making use of physical substances endowed with life and most
of them imagined to be divine” (3, 1, p. 163) [pp. 114—15]. “We find that the principle of
these
((350))
origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the early gentile peoples, by a
demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery,
which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our
literary life” (3, Idea of the Work, I: 28–29) [p. 19]. “Men vent great passions by breaking into
song, . . . that . . . they were inexpressive save under the impulse of violent passions—[lead to
the conjecture that] their first languages must have been formed in singing” (3, I: 95 [J.-B.
Vico, Oeuvres choisies], tr. [J.] Chaix-Ruy [Paris, 1946]) [p. 69]. “All that has been reasoned
out seems clearly to confute the common error of the grammarians, who say that prose speech
came first and speech in verse afterward. And within
the origins of poetry, as they have here
been disclosed, we have found the origins of languages and letters” (Book II, Poetic Wisdom,
Chap. V, S 5, [Oeuvres choisies de Vico,] tr. [J.] Michelet [(Paris, 1893-99), vol. 27,] (p. 430)
[p. 142]. For Vico, as for Rousseau, the progress of language follows the progress of
articulation. Thus, language suffers a fall and humanizes itself through the loss of its poetry
and its divine character: “The language of the gods was almost entirely mute, only very
slightly articulate; the language of the heroes, an equal mixture of articulate and mute, . . . the
language of men, almost entirely articulate and only very slightly mute” (3, I : 178, tr. Chaix-
Ruy) [p. 134].
3.Condillac recognized the convergence of his and Warburton’s thoughts, rather than his debt
to the latter. Yet this convergence, as we shall immediately see, is not complete: “This section
was near finished, when I happened to light on an essay on hieroglyphics, extracted from the
second volume of Dr. Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses; a work equally distinguished
for strength of reasoning and variety of erudition. With pleasure I found that this author’s
notions and mine coincided, in supposing that language must, from its first beginning, have
been very figurative and metaphysical. My own reflections had led me to observe, that writing
at first could be no more than a simple picture; but I had not as yet made any attempt to
discover by what progress mankind arrived at the invention of letters, and it seemed difficult
to me to succeed in the inquiry. The task has been exceedingly well executed by Dr.
Warburton, of whom the greatest part of this chapter has been borrowed” (Chap. 13, “Of
Writing,” S 127, p. 177) [p. 273 n.].
4.Page 195. “This way of Speaking by Simile, we may conceive to answer to the Chinese
Marks or Characters in
Writing; and as from such Marks proceeded the abbreviated Method
of Alphabetic Letters, so from the Similitude, to make Language still more expedite and
elegant, came the METAPHOR; which is indeed but a Similitude in little: For Men so
conversant in matter still wanted sensible Images to convey abstract Ideas” (Essai sur les
hiéroglyphes, T.I, pp. 85–86) [p. 94]. “This, and not the Warmth of a Poetic Fancy, as is
commonly supposed, was the true Original of figurative Expression. We see it even at this
Day in the Style of the American Barbarians, tho’ of the coldest and most flegmatic
Complexions. . . . Their Phlegm could only make their Stile concise, not take away the
Figures: and the Conjunction of these different Characters in it, shews plainly that Metaphors
were from Necessity, not Choice. . . . Thus we see it has ever been the way of Man, both in
Speech and
Writing, as well as in
Clothes and
Habitations, to turn his Wants and Necessities
into Parade and Ornament” (PP. 195–97) [PP. 147-48].
5.METAPHORE, S. F. (gram.). “M. du Marsais says that it is a figure by which the proper
signification of a noun (I would prefer to say a word) is carried over, so to speak, to another
signification which is not appropriate to it except by virtue of a comparison which is in the
mind. A word taken in its metaphoric sense loses its proper signification, and acquires a new
one that presents itself to the mind only by the comparison undertaken between the proper
meaning of the word and what one compares it to: for example, when one says that falsehood
often decks itself in the colors of truth.” And after long quotations from Marsais: “I have