Umberto Eco - The Search for the Perfect Language

Umberto Eco, La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea — Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1993 (series “Fare l’Europa,” dir. Jacques Le Goff). English translation: The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Eco’s subject is a European obsession: the dream of a perfect language, one in which a name and the thing it names would coincide exactly — no slippage, no ambiguity, the world made fully legible. Its lost original is Adamic: the language of Adam, in which naming the animals meant grasping their nature — the “motivated” name of Plato’s _Cratylus_ — scattered at Babel into the confusion of tongues.

What follows, in Eco’s telling, is a search that never ends, because its object cannot in principle be reached: a language of complete and final knowledge is not the kind of thing one arrives at. Kabbalistic combinatorics, Llull’s ars, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the a priori philosophical languages of the seventeenth century, Leibniz’s characteristica universalis, on down to Esperanto — each is another approach to a horizon that keeps receding.

The point Eco returns to is that the failure is fertile. The perfect language never arrives, but the by-products of chasing it do: formal logic, taxonomy, combinatorics, the distant ancestors of the languages I now work in. This is the note behind the misplaced manifesto’s line about a search that “keeps shedding loose material” — the temporal half of the blog’s founding metaphor, and the counterpart to the spatial valley of A.E. Stallings - Lost and Found. Where Stallings gives loss a place, Eco gives it a clock: not where things go, but why the looking has no end.