Thinking with Trees: Philosophical and Legal Genealogies in “Auto-Icon” and Other Texts by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Résumés
Cet article porte sur un traité que Jeremy Bentham a laissé inachevé et non publié à la fin de sa vie, intitulé « Auto-Icon ; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living », dans lequel l’arbre de la connaissance, l’arbre du droit (arbor jurisdictionis) et l’arbre généalogique sont entrelacés. Des dialogues y sont mis en scène entre les Auto-Icônes, ou effigies, de philosophes et juristes, ce qui permet de comparer leurs positions sur des sujets comme le savoir, le droit ou la transmission. Dans le domaine de l’épistémologie, Bentham cherchait à corriger les défauts des modèles existants de diagrammes arborescents, tout en demeurant convaincu que le modèle de l’arbre restait le mieux à même d’offrir une vue d’ensemble de la structure des arts et des sciences. Dans ce contexte, l’arbre est à la fois une ressource et un défi, son usage soulevant de nombreuses questions concernant sa composition, son orientation, son ornementation, ou encore le nombre adéquat de sous-divisions. Le fait de devoir trancher ces questions a permis à Bentham de se positionner dans une généalogie philosophique. L’arbre est également très présent dans la discussion des usages « commémoratifs » qui peuvent être faits des Auto-Icônes, ce qui est notamment lié au rôle clé que les bois et forêts ont joué dans la construction de la tradition de la Common Law comme généalogie patrilinéaire ininterrompue. Par son usage de l’ironie et de la satire, Bentham semble tourner en dérision à la fois les prétentions de la noblesse et, dans un mouvement réflexif, ses propres efforts pour assurer sa renommée posthume. Empreint d’excès et d’étrangetés, « Auto-Icon » est un texte qui rappelle à ses lecteurs que l’arbre n’est pas une métaphore « naturelle » et que ses divers usages ont une histoire qu’il convient de mettre au jour pour en comprendre la portée idéologique.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Bentham (Jeremy), Auto-Icône, arbre de la connaissance, droit, généalogie, épistémologie, logiquePlan
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Introduction
1In a portrait made posthumously in 1835 and entitled “Jeremy Bentham in an Imaginary Landscape”, the reformer is represented sitting under a tree, in a natural setting, which may be read as a reflection of his love of botany – an often-neglected aspect of his life.
Fig. 1. George Frederick Watts, “Jeremy Bentham in an Imaginary Landscape”, 1835. Oil. 194x143mm. UCL Art Museum, University College London. UCL No: 5580.
- 1 Jeremy Bentham, Memoirs, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, Edinburgh, William Tait, 18 (...)
- 2 Bart Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians, Princeton (...)
2In his Memoirs, Bentham recalls that some of his early reading took place in the branches of a “lofty elm”.1 He later became “a most earnest horticulturalist”: “Gardens, botany, and the study of plants from all over the world were [indeed] real and lasting passions,” which he was able to indulge in his own country home, Ford Abbey, in Devonshire, where he spent half the year between 1814 and 1818.2 He corresponded with members of the London Botanic Garden, who urged him to ask his brother Samuel, when he left for Russia, to send rare Siberian seeds back to London. He also corresponded with Samuel’s wife Mary, with whom he exchanged seeds and made plans to retrieve and grow exotic specimens in England, an interest which may account for some of the images discussed below, such as that of the convolvulus, which originates from Egypt and Turkey. Finally, Bentham’s nephew George was to become a renowned botanist who became president of the Linnean society, produced influential works on what were then called “colonial flowers,” and made significant donations to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.
- 3 Bentham’s Auto-Icon used to sit in a mahogany and glass case in the South Cloister of the main buil (...)
- 4 To avoid confusions, “Auto-Icon” will refer to the text while Auto-Icon (without inverted commas) w (...)
- 5 Jeremy Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings, ed. J. E. Crimmins, Bristol, Thoemmes Pre (...)
3The painting was not made from life, but posthumously, using Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon. In his will, the reformer had left instructions for his body to be publicly dissected and thereafter for his remains – the skeleton and the preserved head – to be reassembled, clothed and displayed.3 “Auto-Icon” actually refers to two things: not only Bentham’s effigy, but also an unfinished treatise on which he was still working shortly before his death, entitled “Auto-Icon; or, Farther uses of the dead to the living.” 4The text was printed and circulated privately, but not published in the 1843 collection of his Works, which may be explained by its morbid theme, its bizarre suggestions and its lack of organization – for instance, although eleven points are initially announced, only six are actually covered. The short text – about twenty pages – was only made available in 2002.5 It is full of wit, irony, and satire, and readers – who can tell the author is writing tongue in cheek – do not always know how seriously they should take it.
- 6 The essay, written by Thomas Southwood Smith, a Unitarian minister, physician and also a close frie (...)
4The idea of the Auto-Icon seems less eccentric when put in the context of the debates which were then raging around anatomical dissection. As an atheist and utilitarian, Bentham sought to counter the prejudice against dissection in the interest of advancing medical knowledge, and hoped to set an example, at a time when there was a shortage of bodies for medical research. But this is not his main concern in this treatise. In the opening lines of the text, he refers readers who would like to go deeper in the topic to an essay which had appeared in the Westminster Review in 1824.6 What does concern him in his own treatise is the many uses to which Auto-Icons may be put, which mobilize metaphorical trees on several levels.
5The image of the tree is indeed very much present in the treatise, as an epistemological model (the tree of knowledge), as a symbol of law (arbor jurisdictionis) and in connection with legacy (the genealogical tree). This article shows how the three dimensions are interwoven at the intersection of the visual and the discursive. The tree is a powerful metaphor rooted in tradition and this essay will account for the ways in which Bentham positioned his own uses of the tree as an image in relation to pre-existing models. Taking my cue from the author, I will locate “Auto-Icon” in the context of his own earlier works such as Chrestomathia.
- 7 Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore vive, Paris, Seuil, 1975; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Li (...)
- 8 Marine Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée : Métaphores végétales de la filiation et de l’alliance (...)
- 9 Ibid., p. 26-27, my translation.
6Far from being merely ornamental, the tree as a metaphor plays a heuristic role. As philosopher Paul Ricœur, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have shown, metaphors are not limited to an aesthetic role, but are also a tool for knowledge and for the representation of the world, since ways of speaking and writing entail ways of thinking.7 Furthermore, the tree, as a “dead metaphor” which in the eighteenth century was already commonly and unthinkingly used, carries “strong ideological implications”8 which can go unnoticed as these “banal images” appear as “immemorial words of wisdom, made available to all in language”.9 As the analyses below demonstrate, there are many different ways of “reading” a tree.
Theatrical Uses of Auto-Icons: The Tree of Knowledge, Epistemology and Instruction
Bentham, Bacon, d’Alembert and the Tree of Knowledge
- 10 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 13.
- 11 See Crimmins’ introduction in J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. xii.
- 12 Ibid., p. lix.
7Bentham hoped that his own Auto-Icon could be staged in conversation with those of other philosophers – these he called the theatrical, or dramatic uses – for educational purposes, in the tradition of the “Dialogues of the dead,” such as those written by Fontenelle. In the previous century, there had indeed been numerous such texts, in which theological, political, and philosophical questions were discussed by great thinkers in fictitious dialogues. Bentham thus refers to Fontenelle’s efforts to “amuse and instruct his nation and the civilized world” by such means.10 His innovation consisted in imagining these discussions actually taking place on stage, reflecting “developments in public amusement” such as the “popular passion for puppet theatre” and “fascination with figurative representations of the famous and infamous.”11 But, as Crimmins points out, in “scripting dialogues between his own auto-iconised self and other experts in several fields, with many of whom he did not agree” Bentham is “walk[ing] a haphazard path through the farcical and the serious.”12
8One of these imaginary dialogues is devoted to the tree of knowledge, and involves Bentham, Francis Bacon, and d’Alembert. Here are Bacon’s lines:
- 13 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 14. Bentham’s use of “root”, rather than “trunk”, and (...)
I was the first who planted the tree of knowledge. Without much impropriety I might have called it after Holy Writ, the Tree of Good and Evil. It lived, but it had no root, and the branches of it were weak and entangled. You [Bentham] planted your tree. Your tree had a root, and that a strong and a sweet one – sweet as the convolvulus, the offspring of the tropics. Yours was manured and pruned by you, each branch forming the basis of two others, each crowned by a little, but a golden fruit, as if reared in the garden of the Hesperides.13
9The reference here of course is to Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Knowledge (1605), a central text of scientific empiricism which attempted to systematize knowledge by identifying three main areas of human learning – History, Poetry, and Philosophy – which corresponded to the three parts of Man’s Understanding, namely Memory, Imagination, and Reason. When discussing subcategories, Bacon drew on the tree metaphor, commenting that:
- 14 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Knowledge, ed. Michael Kiernan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, p. (...)
[T]he distributions and partitions of knowledge, are not like seuerall lines, that meete in one Angle, and so touch but in a point, but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stemme; which hath a dimension and quantitie of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue & break it self into Armes and boughs.14
10The point of Bacon’s lines in the “Auto-Icon” treatise is thus to highlight the flaws of his own model for the tree of knowledge, which, according to Bentham, lacked a root and had only “weak and entangled” branches. By contrast, Bentham’s tree was supposed to have a root that was “strong and sweet,” and which consisted in his principle of utility, i.e. achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number by building a system on the premise that humans are driven by two springs which are pain and pleasure.
- 15 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 14.
- 16 Ibid.
11Bentham – or his Auto-Icon – responds to Bacon’s imagined praise by acknowledging his debt to him, stating that “[his] tree was but a cutting taken away from [Bacon’s]”,15 and also paying tribute to d’Alembert, whom he calls his “predecessor, contemporary, master, and correspondent” and who, in his Encyclopaedia, brought Bacon’s tree to Bentham’s attention.16 The tree as an epistemological model thus circulated from one thinker to another and Bentham is in a sense writing himself into a genealogy of philosophers, carving out his space on that specific tree by paying homage to his forebears, but also taking distance with the models they designed. Indeed, as noted above, Bacon’s tree, in his view, lacked a proper root, and Bentham was also critical of the system provided by d’Alembert. In fact, Bentham suggests that if the latter had freed himself from Bacon’s legacy, and had not been “seeking shelter under the mantle of the foreign sage,” he may have offered a system better adapted to his own time:
- 17 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston, in The Collected Works of Jeremy (...)
Of the sketch given by D’Alembert, the leading principles are – as he himself has been careful to declare, taken from that given by Lord Bacon. Had it been entirely his own, it would have been, beyond comparison, a better one; For the age of Bacon, Bacon’s was a precocious and precious fruit of the union of learning with genius: for the age of D’Alembert it will, it is believed, be found but a poor production, below the author as well as the age.17
- 18 Ben Shneiderman, “Foreword”, in Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees. Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, (...)
- 19 M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 26.
- 20 Ibid., p. 10, p. 42.
- 21 Ibid., p. 10.
12The tree is undeniably a powerful metaphor for organizing knowledge. As the preface to Manuel Lima’s The Book of Trees. Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (2014) explains, “[t]he recursive branching structure of trees […] provides a compelling metaphor for organizing knowledge,”18 and the tree metaphor has proved appealing and pliable. The “epistemological model of the tree” is an “important metaphor for knowledge-classification systems” and has been used “to explain almost every facet of life: from consanguinity ties to cardinal virtues, systems of law to domains of science, biological associations to database systems.”19 Trees are “ubiquitous symbols” which “continue to embody a fundamental organizational principle that reflects the way humans look at the world” and are the “result of a strong human desire for order, balance, hierarchy, structure and unity.”20 The tree as a visual archetype, then and now, is a tool for the visualization of information, which serves three goals: to explain and educate; to facilitate cognition and gain insight; and to make the invisible visible.21
- 22 Chrétien Frederic Guillaume Roth, Essai d’une distribution des sciences et des arts principaux, fro (...)
13The tree as a tool for information visualization did not stand alone, and was accompanied by, perhaps in competition with, other tools such as tables. D’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia provides a good example, as its organization was represented both as a table of knowledge (as it did in the original Encyclopaedia, reproduced in Bentham’s Chrestomathia) but also as a tree, for instance in the foldout frontispiece which featured in a 1780 edition of the Encyclopaedia.22 In the latter, the tree depicts the genealogical structure of knowledge, with its three prominent branches following the classification set forth by Bacon in The Advancement of Learning. The overall effect produced at first sight may however be confusion rather than clarity, due to the density of the foliage and proliferation of branches, a point which Bentham would probably have agreed with. While he kept the tree as a metaphor in his writing – with associated terms such as root, branch or twig –, in terms of information visualization, he favoured tables and dichotomous divisions, as can be illustrated in his treatment of the Porphyrian tree.
In the Shade of Porphyry’s Tree: Re-shaping Earlier Models of Logic
- 23 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 15.
- 24 See Figure 18 in M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 28, which shows a “Porphyrian tree” drawn (...)
14Another dialogue imagined by Bentham, on the topic of logic, would have involved Bentham, Porphyry, Locke and Bishop Saunderson. In this passage, Aristotle is acknowledged as the “[i]nventor of the Logic of the Understanding,” and Bentham presented as the “[i]nventor of an additional branch, the technical branch having for its fruit the exhaustively-bifurcate system,” and as the “inventor of the logic of the will.”23 Here again, Bentham, with typical humbleness, positions himself in a genealogy which now reaches back to Aristotle, claiming that he provided an “additional branch” to his predecessor’s logic of the understanding. To put the above-discussed dialogue in perspective, one could argue that the genealogy underlying Bentham’s ideas starts with the Porphyrian tree, whose system was taken up by D’Alembert. A key element in the chain connecting Aristotle to Bacon to D’Alembert and then Bentham is indeed one of the oldest tree archetypes, the one designed by Greek philosopher and logician Porphyry – one of the participants in the imagined dialogue above – in the third century. Based on ideas expressed by Aristotle in his Categories, it represented the scale of being through a structure composed of a central trunk containing the series of genus and species as well as two adjacent columns of succeeding dichotomous divisions. Some representations were quite ornamented, with twisting roots, lush foliage, and grass on the ground.24
- 25 J. Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. 1.
15In the dialogue under consideration, as well as in a footnote to the dialogue staged between Bacon and d’Alembert, Bentham refers his readers to Chrestomathia, alongside which “Auto-Icon” needs to be read. Chrestomathia, which in a general sense denotes a collection of authors whose work it is useful to learn, refers under Bentham’s pen to what is conducive to useful knowledge in a utilitarian sense. It refers to a “collection of papers” – letters, tables, explanations of tables and appendices – put together in 1814, which present his design for a school for the “extension of the new system of instruction to the higher branches of learning” meant for the children of the “middling and higher ranks in life.”25 Its goal is to find the best ways to articulate and pass on the different types of knowledge. As Jean-Pierre Cléro points out in the introduction to his translation of Bentham’s work into French:
- 26 Jean-Pierre Cléro, “Introduction”, Chrestomathia, ed. and transl. Jean-Pierre Cléro, Paris, l’Unebé (...)
In order to know what to teach, but also to learn anything properly, one needs to know how to articulate the globality of sciences and arts, to ensure that nothing has been forgotten and that one knows how to classify by degrees what is essential at each level of education. In other words, in the tree of knowledge as well as in the corresponding tree of techniques, one must be able to organize levels in which ramifications become finer and finer as one moves away from the very first ones. Knowledge is organized in such a way that, whatever the level at which a pupil leaves the Chrestomatic school, they have a sense of the unity of what they have learned[.]26
- 27 Ibid., p. lxv.
16The broader concern of Chrestomathia, in the final analysis, is thus not so much education as epistemology.27
- 28 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, Appendix IV, in Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. (...)
- 29 Ibid., p. 214, original emphasis.
17Of particular interest for present purposes is the appendix entitled “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification.” 28While Bentham acknowledged that the image of the “tree, with its trunk and branches,” remained the “object best adapted to his purpose,” i.e. the classification of knowledge,29 he seemed to believe the ornamental elements were a distraction and to favour abstract figurations. As his treatment of the Porphyrian tree in Chrestomathia illustrates, he did not just advocate more abstract uses of the tree as an epistemological tool but also called for a clearer nomenclature and a different organization in the shape of a dichotomy-based “arboric tabulation system.” Figures 2 and 3 make it possible to compare the shape in which Bentham encountered the Poprhyrian tree and the amended form he would have given it.
Fig.2. From “Table IV. Arbor Porphyriana, seu potius Ramea”. N°I. “The Arbor Porphyriana in its original form; being the forms in which it was transcribed from the copy exhibited in the course of a College Lecture, delivered, Anno 1761, at Queen’s College, Oxford”. Chrestomathia, p. 159. Courtesy of the Bentham Project, UCL.
Fig. 3. From “Table IV. Arbor Porphyriana, seu potius Ramea”. N°II. The Arbor Porphyriana in a supposed amended form: more explicit, and supposed to be, in other respects, now somewhat improved. Chrestomathia, p. 159. Courtesy of the Bentham Project, UCL.
- 30 Ibid., p. 140, original emphasis.
- 31 Ibid., p. 159, original emphasis.
18Similar principles were at work in the criticisms Bentham levelled at the “nomenclature of the main branches of Art and Science” provided by d’Alembert in his “Système figuré des connaissances humaines.” For him, the main problem with the Encyclopaedia nomenclature was that it was not “subservient to those useful purposes, to which an instrument of this sort is capable of being rendered subservient,” namely the ends of utility. Furthermore, not only was the division of faculties into reason, memory, and imagination arbitrary, but it lacked exhaustivity.30 Although d’Alembert’s tree presented itself as a “system of knowledge” and did not mention arts in the title, the words Art and Arts occurred in many places. Moreover, the scheme of division was not regular. While the first step was a bifurcation (a division into two branches), further sub-divisions were not limited to two, but sometimes ran as high as half-a-dozen or more, which led to “logical incongruities” and “practical inconveniences.”31 In a sense, the Encylopaedia provided a counter-model which enabled Bentham to highlight the advantages of his own nomenclature.
Chrestomathia and the Arboric Tabulation System
- 32 For a critique of attempts at imposing legibility, simplification and centralization onto natural a (...)
- 33 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, op. cit., p. 151.
- 34 Ibid., p. 152, original emphasis.
- 35 Ibid., p. 185.
19From the point of view of language, Bentham argued that denominations should be ordinary and systematic; that they should give a clear, correct and complete idea of the contents of each branch; and that they should show the relations to the other branches of art and science included in the same system, as well as provide maximum information in minimum space.32 Bentham stressed that the names conventionally given to branches of knowledge were misleading. For example, since philosophy means the love of wisdom, “natural philosophy” should mean the natural love of wisdom.33 Likewise, “mathematics” denotes anything that is “learnt or considered as capable of being learnt,” so that it could “be used to designate the art of legislation, or the art of push-pin, no less than of Geometry or Algebra.”34 For the sake of clarity, then, Bentham suggested a number of neologisms, renaming “Mathematics” as “Posology,” and dividing it into two branches: form-regarding, so “Morphoscopic” and “form-not-regarding,” or “Amorphoscopic,” which could also be called “Alegomorphoscopic.”35 However, these coinages were not as successful as others offered by Bentham – such as “deontology” or “international” – and to this day, we still speak of mathematics, geometry, and algebra.
- 36 Ibid., p. 166, original emphasis.
- 37 Jean-Pierre Cléro, “‘Art’ et ‘science’ dans Chrestomathia”, Revue d’études benthamiennes 18, 2020. (...)
20While d’Alembert’s system made space for technical knowledge, it still suffered, according to Bentham, from a high degree of intellectualism. Techniques were present in the table but it was knowledge and understanding which were foregrounded, with the organizing subject characterized by the three faculties of memory, reason, and imagination. Regarding reason specifically, it covered such a wide-ranging, eclectic and vague territory that it failed to explain anything about what it was supposed to govern. By contrast, Bentham’s dual system featured Eudaemonics (the pursuit of happiness) as the universal trunk of art, and Ontology as the universal trunk of science, each branch of art having a corresponding branch of science, and vice versa. For the purposes of selection, Bentham wrote that: “[i]n art and science, not merely every existing branch, but even the minutest twig, must have given exercise to the inventive faculty.”36 Arts and sciences were thus inseparable, with “sciences” being taken in the sense of knowledge or learning and “arts” in the general sense it had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, i.e. a technical one, which included the fine arts but also the productions of craftsmen and workers.37
- 38 J. Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. 213, original emphasis.
- 39 Ibid., p. 216.
- 40 Ibid., p. 157, original emphasis.
- 41 J.-P. Cléro, “‘Art’ et ‘science’”, art. cit.
21Bentham’s Encyclopaedical sketch comes in two shapes: a “continued discourse, expressed in the form of ordinary language” as well as a “Systematic Table or Diagram, so constructed as to be in some degree emblematic,” bringing out both the objects and the relations between them.38 Anyone holding Bentham’s ideal encyclopaedical tree in her hand would be able to “skip backwards and forwards, with the rapidity of thought, from twig to twig, hunting out and pursuing whatsoever analogies it appears to afford.”39 In terms of organization, Bentham advocated bifurcation or, from the Greek, dichotomy, which, in his words, is “rendered in English by the word two-pronged, as applied to a fork”.40 The method, of course, is not without its inherent difficulties, in particular regarding the choice of the elements which are relevant to determine the bifurcation every time there is an important knot. As Cléro points out, there are in fact multiple possible options, and depending on which characteristic is selected to orient the bifurcation, one gets different results.41
22But Bentham’s elaboration on the tree model also highlights its limitations. Indeed, in his own diagram, what should logically be regarded as the root appears at the top. As he explains:
- 42 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, op. cit., p. 212.
Though, by means of some of the above-mentioned appellatives, – viz. trunk, universal trunk, partial trunks, and intermediate branches, the matter of the Table is spoken of as if it were arranged in the form of a tree, yet the position of the object styled the universal trunk, is at the top of the table, – and that of the branches, instead of being higher and higher, is lower and lower, as they recede from it. Question. Why this apparent contradiction and incongruity? Answer. That, here in the tabular diagram, as in the continued explanatory discourse, those parts, which, for the understanding of it, require to be first read, may be the first to meet the eye.42
- 43 Ibid., original emphasis.
23He goes on to justify this reversal by drawing an example from nature, arguing that “Roots, as well as trunks, have their branches” and that sometimes, either through the “hand of Nature” or the “hand of the artist,” branches are “curved in the earth, while roots are exposed to the air” so that “roots are found to be convertible into branches, as well as branches into roots.”43
- 44 Christine Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissa (...)
24Here, Bentham is underlining the limitations of the tree model, echoing remarks which have been made about its application to genealogies. Indeed, it has been pointed out that placing the ancestor at the bottom of a genealogical tree in a sense runs counter to the very idea of descendance and of the image of life as a flow coming down from ancestors.44 In fact, the idea of a descending filiation may seem incompatible with the metaphor of a tree which reaches upwards, and the same objection may be raised when it comes to the tree of knowledge.
- 45 M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 97.
- 46 Ibid. Examples include a 1485 Porphyrian tree of qualities by Jacobus Publicus in Artes orandi, epi (...)
- 47 Ibid.
25The privileging of bifurcation goes along with a shift from a vertical to a horizontal model, as can be seen in the figure below. This “arboric tabulation system” is meant to be read from left to right. Horizontal trees are indeed one of the shapes in which trees as tools of information visualization may come. When one adopts a “more schematic and abstract construct, deprived of realistic arboreal features”, then it becomes possible to rotate the tree diagram”.45 Horizontal trees made it possible to deal with layout requirements and were often “deployed on facing pages of a manuscript, with the root of the tree at the very center, creating a type of mirroring effect.”46 But another advantage was the fact that the “nesting arrangement of horizontal trees resembles the grammatical construct of a sentence.”47 In keeping with the principle highlighted above, the specificity of Bentham’s arboric tabulation system is that it limits itself to two subdivisions where other horizontal trees often use multiple sublevels.
Fig. 4. Jeremy Bentham. “Arboric tabulation system” (undated). Bentham Papers. Box 96, folio 221. UCL Special Collections, UCL Archives, London.
- 48 Ibid., p. 40.
26Bentham’s engagement with the tree as an epistemological model may illustrate a more general movement in the eighteenth century, away from realistic, arboreal configurations and towards more abstract constructs. To quote Lima again, “at some point, someone must have realized that the hierarchical logic of a tree could be conveyed without many of its arboreal embellishments.”48 Bentham certainly made a more abstract and diagrammatic use of the model. Furthermore, while the tree metaphor runs through the text of Chrestomathia, it is not the only one. References to maps, fields, land and architecture are also common. Such rival metaphors open equally suggestive possibilities to convey Bentham’s ambition to provide a synthetic view at one glance, or, as he puts it, a synoptic table or diagram.
“Commemorational” Uses and Legal Genealogies
Trees, Law and Justice: Mnemonic and Symbolic Functions
- 49 Ibid., p. 33.
- 50 Ibid. As a legal term, a “substitution” (or “substitutional legacy” or “substitutional gift”) refer (...)
27Trees also played a role in the legal sphere as visualization and mnemonic tools to deal with complex legal information. The tree figure was indeed used to convey various expressions of law, such as papal bulls or decrees, legal treatises, and the rulings and verdicts of the monarchs. Lima’s book includes a 1559 tree figure which was part of a series of formal announcements or decrees from Pope Clement V (1305-1314) and offered a map of a series of decrees on the law of patronage. The interest of the tree figure is highlighted in a comment above the tree itself, which reads, in Latin: “Since the matter of this title is too intricate, difficult, and quotidian: it might be easier to comprehend using the figurative art of a trunk.”49 Another striking example is a 1552 Tree of Substitutions from Apud Hugonem à Porta which gave a visual form to widely used sections of the Code of Justinian on succession, substitutions and related matters.50 Closer to Bentham, and as late as 1878, a tree diagram by US American lawyer Royal C. Bierce illustrates William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England under the title “The Common Law – In the Similitude of a tree.” This particular tree had two major branches (rights and wrongs) which were then divided into various topics following the outline of Blackstone’s highly-influential treatise. The illustration was thus meant to be a visual aid to study Blackstone’s landmark work.
- 51 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a servitude, in civil law, refers to “a subjection or s (...)
- 52 The illustration is to be found in the Sennetoniana, i.e. an illustrated edition of Justinian’s Cor (...)
- 53 V. Hayaert, “The Gordian knot”, art. cit., p. 51.
- 54 Ibid.
- 55 Ibid.
28Another fascinating example studied by Valérie Hayaert is a 1549 “Arbor Servitutum” which was meant to be a mnemonic diagram showing how different categories of servitudes were distributed by positioning them in shields borne by Actæon’s antlers.51 The latter’s ramifications inevitably bring to mind the tree image.52 As Hayaert points out, this specific tree “is not a usual tree of life, that would assign to each order (biological and social) a patrilinear transmission.”53 Rather, it is a “tool of and for metamorphosis,” a tree which creates a “dynamic link” between the vegetal reign, animal species and human beings.54 Resorting to the tree figure thus did not necessarily entail a static or conservative world view. Likewise, a 1549 “Arbor Juridictionum” shows Justinian standing next to a tree of law, whose branches grow horizontally – yet another example departing from the vertical organization of the Porphyrian tree, which “proceed[s] upside down, from genus to species” – and which features dead branches as well as “emerging and burgeoning limbs” thanks to new grafts, suggesting evolution rather than conservatism.55
- 56 Robert Jacob, Images de la justice : essai sur l’iconographie judiciaire du Moyen âge à l’âge class (...)
- 57 Lima suggests that the idea of the tree of life was “appropriated from Jewish, Assyrian and Sumeria (...)
- 58 R. Jacob, Images de la justice, op. cit., p. 39, my translation.
- 59 Ibid., p. 39-40, my translation. The role of trees in the myths, rites, and judicial practices in t (...)
29But trees did not play a mnemonic role only in law. They were also invested more broadly with heavy symbolism. As Robert Jacob points out in his discussion of judicial rituals and symbols, images – whether visual or linguistic – are not constructed but inherited, and the tree is no exception. 56In numerous cultures which are by no means limited to medieval Christianity, the axus mundi which connects the earth to the heavens often takes the shape of a primeval tree which is perceived as a source of life and is closely associated to justice. 57The regeneration of foliage suggests that “each dead season will be followed by a rebirth, just as justice is expected to restore, after each falling off, the harmony which will make the bearing of new fruits possible.”58 Furthermore, the longevity of trees explains why they often symbolize memory and custom. Ultimately, “permanence, the connection between the natural and the supernatural, the cyclical victory of life over death, of fertility over barrenness” are attributes of the “universal tree” which correspond to the hopes which men place in justice.59
30The veneration of trees, also known as dendrolatry, and the association between trees and justice may have found their way into English law through its Saxon origins. More precisely, they were very much present in the ways the Saxon legacy was imagined and claimed in the Common Law tradition down to Bentham’s time.
Arbor jurisdictionis: Dendrolatry and the English Common Law as a Patrilinear Genealogy
- 60 Peter Goodrich, An Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing (...)
31One of the possible dialogues listed but not developed in “Auto-Icon” would have been dedicated to the topic of jurisprudence, and would have involved Justinian, Coke, Blackstone, Eldon, Peel and Brougham. In this distinguished assembly, Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) and William Blackstone (1723-1780) stand out as representatives of the Common Law tradition, in which woods and trees also played a metaphorical role. As it happens, “Sir Edward Coke starts the first volume of the Institutes of the Laws of England, of 1610, with an image Sir Thomas Lyttleton, who stood at the helm of the English tradition, and an inscription of the genealogical tree, arbor jurisdictionis, to which he belonged”.60 As Peter Goodrich explains,
- 61 Ibid., p. 14.
For Sir Edward Coke and other early compilers and commentators of English law, the figure of legal discourse was that of a seamless tradition, embedded in time immemorial, coeval with the land, and passed in an unbroken lineage from an antiquity so ancient as to originate in nature and so also in immediate proximity to God.61
- 62 Ibid., p. 15.
32Goodrich goes on to add that “English common law was aesthetically distinctive as well, and was adumbrated, for a more explicit recourse to mythology, to the esoteric and arcane figure of Druids and time immemorial.”62 The figure of the Druids, in this mythical relation to law, is indissociable from the woods, which were supposed to be the birthplace of the English constitution and its ancestral freedoms.
- 63 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, éd. Laurent Versini, 2 vols., Paris, Gallimard/Folio Essais, 199 (...)
- 64 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a study of English historical thought (...)
33The idea that the English constitution had been found in the woods was widespread. It appears in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which uses Tacitus’s Germania (98) as evidence.63 Woods were home to Druids but also Saxons, mythical ancestors who were supposed to be at the origin of English freedoms, as Pocock demonstrates in his work on The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law.64 Furthermore, such traditions were supposed to have been passed on without any interruption down generations, which is why the theory of the Norman yoke, and the break it introduced, proved problematic.
- 65 C. Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree”, art. cit., p. 105.
- 66 Ibid.
- 67 M. Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée, op. cit., p. 11, my translation.
- 68 Ibid., p. 12, my translation.
- 69 V. Hayaert, “The Gordian knot”, art. cit., p. 32.
- 70 Ibid., p. 43. See Fig. 1.9, p. 37.
34One could reasonably argue that English Common Law was represented as a patrilinear legacy, bringing to mind the image of the genealogical tree, which is far from neutral. As Christine Klapisch-Zuber explains, “trees have for centuries […] been used to represent family lineage” because of apparent affinities: “Like a tree, a family is born, flourishes, branches out and withers”.65 Furthermore, “the metaphor of the tree manages to express not only the blood relationships, the organic growth of a lineage, and the cohesiveness of the male line, but also the marital alliances and interbreeding of princely families.”66 As natural as it may seem – to the point of being unseen and unthought – the tree metaphor is however far from universal, and one should remember that its aim is not “the description of a physical phenomenon, but that of a social institution.”67 Although images such as that of the genealogical tree have become commonplaces, they do “carry a highly biased conception of filiation,” in which the ideal is the “patrilinear structure of the filiation group, in which each individual only gets his identity from the whole of which he is a temporary representative.”68 Or, as Valérie Hayaert puts it: “The figure of the tree is a genealogically conscious visual strategy that helps to figure and teach the institutional order of patrilinear transmission.”69 Commenting on a woodcut entitled “De Haereditatis” which depicts a sacred tree emerging from a tomb, also taken from the Sennetoniana, she stresses that the tree acts as a “marker of a sacred space of patrilinear transmission.”70 Its ultimate function is to legitimize social order.
- 71 Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies, ed. Philip Schofield, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
35Such considerations need to be borne in mind when turning to the “commemorational” uses which Bentham considered in “Auto-Icon.” The reformer started his writing career with A Fragment on Government, published in 1764, which attacked Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and, through it, the whole Common Law tradition. In his Book of Fallacies, he also deconstructed the fallacies by which the established order was maintained, and which included conceptions propagated by Blackstone but also Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), such as the idea that ancestors were wiser, that institutions were inherited, preserved and progressively amended, and that legal and political innovation was dangerous.71 His goal, throughout his career, was to expose the fictions by which established order was preserved, and this makes his development on the commemorational uses of Auto-Icons all the more surprising and suspicious.
Commemorational Uses of Auto-Icons, Genealogical Trees and Pedigrees
- 72 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 3.
- 73 Ibid., p. 5, original emphasis. The first meaning of “pedigree” is “a genealogical stemma or table; (...)
36The uses which Bentham envisioned for his and other people’s Auto-Icons included “commemorational” and “genealogical” ones. Seemingly taking to heart the interests and practices of the aristocracy, he wrote: “Such of the rich as chose it, would have an apartment destined exclusively for their own kindred. On occasions they might be produced. If a country gentleman had rows of trees leading to his dwelling, the Auto-Icons of his family might alternate with the trees.”72 Like statues, Auto-Icons would thus co-exist with trees. Furthermore, turning to the “genealogical or aristocratical use,” Bentham suggested Auto-Icons would provide an “appropriate accompaniment” to “the document called a pedigree”: “what expressive remains, – likenesses more perfect than painting or sculpture could furnish. In their mansions opulent families might have an apartment as a receptable for the Auto-Icons belonging to it, ranged like so many statues.”73
- 74 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 5.
- 75 Erik Ketelaar, “The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to S (...)
- 76 Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe, It (...)
- 77 E. Ketelaar, “The Genealogical Gaze”, art. cit., p. 21. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and (...)
37As Bentham himself stresses, there are “historical analogies.”74 Indeed, genealogical trees did not stand alone, but were accompanied by all sorts of letters, illustrations of family tombs, transcripts of family archives and records, deeds and estate papers often kept in special rooms in aristocratic mansions, and which were essential to prove one’s lineage and property rights. The seventeenth century may have constituted a turning point at which oral testimonies were no longer regarded as sufficient evidence, so that written documents were produced, such as the Digbiorum, the family pedigree drawn up for Sir Kenelm Digby in 1634 and kept at the archives at Sherborne Castle. Not only did it include family trees, but also illustrations of family tombs as well as transcripts of the family archives.75 Writing about early modern Amsterdam, Julia Adams points out how “for a man or his family, the successfully achieved social fiction of an unbroken line of honorable, preferably patrilineal, descent was what counted in establishing enduring claims to politico-economic privilege.”76 In the seventeenth century, it became customary to leave to the eldest son the family portraits, the family Bible, the pedigree, and the family chronicles.77
- 78 M. Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée, op. cit., p. 10, my translation.
- 79 Ibid.
- 80 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 5.
38Bentham’s suggestion that effigies of ancestors be kept in aristocratic mansions thus has historical bases: the documents and artefacts which accompanied genealogical trees beginning in the seventeenth century and, reaching even further back, the stemma used in ancient Rome. Indeed, as Bretin-Chabrol points out, although the genealogical tree “only found its iconographic formalization at the end of the medieval period,” it found “fragmented origins” in Ancient Rome.78 Under the Republic, members of the Senatorial order would display the portraits of their ancestors in the shape of wax masks kept in small wood closets. Under the Empire, the collection of masks and the fresco which later replaced it were known as stemma, a term which in the Middle Ages came to refer to the schema used to calculate degrees of kinship.79 Bentham juxtaposes this very serious cultural and historical reality with whimsical suggestions, writing that if space were to lack, one could preserve ancestors’ heads only, which could be stored in churches; in pyramids like cannon-balls or stacked perpendicularly like bricks in a wall. The “historical analogy” he suggests for keeping aristocratic ancestors’ Auto-Icons in closets has nothing to do with ancient Rome or seventeenth-century Europe, but takes readers to the land of fable: “In such a closet the terrific Blue Beard secreted the remains of his ill-fated wives. But analogy, it is hoped, when thus officiating, will know better than to bring terror in her hand. To murder, Auto-Iconism has not natural relation whatever.”80 Bentham’s development on the “commemorational” uses of Auto-Icons is thus rooted in actual practices which had to do with law and property, but he takes them to extremes.
- 81 Ibid., p. lxvii.
- 82 Tsin Yen Koh, “Bad Jokes and Good Taste: an Essay on Bentham’s ‘Auto-Icon’”, Revue d’études bentham (...)
39By juxtaposing the serious with the frivolous, and the sacred with the mundane, the text casts ridicule on the serious and the sacred. In his dealing with questions of lineage, patrimony and genealogy – and in keeping with his earlier writings – Bentham thus manages to ridicule the pretensions of the aristocracy, as well as – in other sections of the text – the legal establishment and the Church. But the joke is also on himself, as when he imagines a shrine holding his Auto-Icon, to which the votaries of the greatest happiness principle would go on a pilgrimage. As Crimmins remarks, “the philosopher who entertained this eccentric thought was the same keen-eyed critic who condemned the slavish adherence to authorities, whether in law or philosophy, as ‘the worship of dead men’s bones.’”81 One way of solving this apparent contradiction may be to argue that Bentham makes fun of the social, religious, and political desire for immortality but also of his own pretensions to immortality, in a form of self-parody. In this respect, one could follow Tsin Yen Koh’s reading of this intriguing mock-treatise as a bad joke which is an exercise both in the liberty of opinion and in the liberty of taste.82 Indeed, if the liberty of taste means anything, it must mean the liberty to depart from the canons of good taste.
Conclusion
- 83 M. Lima, introduction, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 27.
- 84 B. Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers, op. cit., p. 80.
40The treatise entitled “Auto-Icon” provides an opportunity to look back at Bentham’s writing career and at the different types of cultural work done by the tree as a metaphor in epistemology, law, and politics. While it is possible to trace early models such as Porphyry’s tree, or the stemmata (or tree diagrams) used by Roman lawyers to convey regulations pertaining to parentage and marriage, it was in the High Middle Ages that the tree became generalized as a tool for information visualization.83 In “Auto-Icon,” we find Bentham engaging with previous metaphorical uses in the Renaissance (Bacon’s tree of knowledge, Coke’s tree of law) and the Enlightenment (d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia). His reworking of the tree model highlights the connections and the tensions between verbal metaphor and visual expression. If the verbal metaphor persists, the challenge seems to come from visual expression, hence the alternatives of the horizontal tree, the bifurcation system and the table. Turning to Chrestomathia, as Bentham suggests we do in “Auto-Icon,” bears out Schultz’s suggestion that his cast of mind was “really less turgidly legalistic than scientific, even botanical, in its love of identification and classification.”84 In this context, the tree was as much a resource as a challenge, raising a number of questions – should it be read from top to bottom or the other way round? Should it be vertical or horizontal? Should it be ornamented or abstract? How many subdivisions should be used for each branch? – which led Bentham to position himself in a genealogy of philosophers.
41But the tree also stands at the intersection of law, property, and politics, and the treatment it receives at Bentham’s hands in “Auto-Icon” challenges the assumptions which underlie common conceptions of genealogy – which are often embodied in tree figures. The radical reformer’s sudden apparent interest in questions of aristocratic genealogies is best understood in light of the role played by trees and woods in the Common Law tradition, which was presented as an unbroken line of patrilineal descent, and of genealogical figures and effigies in pedigrees which were meant to buttress the same social fiction. With its excesses and oddities, “Auto-Icon” acts as a reminder of the fact that the tree is not a “natural” metaphor and that its various uses have a history, which needs to be traced so as to avoid passive absorption of the ideology they convey. As such, it is in keeping with the philosopher’s attention to language, social fictions and their visual materializations, and his overall demythologizing enterprise. As the numerous examples mobilized to contextualize and account for Bentham’s suggestions have shown, the tree as an image is highly pliable, always constructed, and can be made to evoke stasis or movement, conservation or evolution.
Notes
1 Jeremy Bentham, Memoirs, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, Edinburgh, William Tait, 1859, 11 vols., vol. x, p. 22. Bentham recalls: “I used to climb a lofty elm, and read in its branches. I was the more fond of this while the labourers were thrashing corn in the neighbourhood, as I was delighted to be in society with which I was not compelled to mix. No situation brought with it more felicity than to hide myself in the tree, and, having read for some time, to descend to gather up wheat for the peasants to thrash, and them to mount again to my lofty throne” (ibid.).
2 Bart Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 80; Janet Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 286.
3 Bentham’s Auto-Icon used to sit in a mahogany and glass case in the South Cloister of the main building of UCL but has since been relocated to the ground floor of the Student Centre, in a glass box. The portrait features Bentham’s walking stick, which he had nicknamed “Dapple”, and is made of fruit wood.
4 To avoid confusions, “Auto-Icon” will refer to the text while Auto-Icon (without inverted commas) will refer to the effigy.
5 Jeremy Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings, ed. J. E. Crimmins, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 2002.
6 The essay, written by Thomas Southwood Smith, a Unitarian minister, physician and also a close friend of Bentham’s, is entitled “On the Use of the Dead to the Living” and features among the texts included in J. E. Crimmins’s edition cited above.
7 Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore vive, Paris, Seuil, 1975; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live by, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1980; see also Joelle Gardes Tamine, Au cœur du langage. La métaphore, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2011.
8 Marine Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée : Métaphores végétales de la filiation et de l’alliance en latin classique, Grenoble, Editions Jérôme Million, 2012, p. 25, my translation.
9 Ibid., p. 26-27, my translation.
10 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 13.
11 See Crimmins’ introduction in J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. xii.
12 Ibid., p. lix.
13 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 14. Bentham’s use of “root”, rather than “trunk”, and in the singular may seem surprising but the latter aspect makes sense as the foundation of Bentham’s system is the principle of utility.
14 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Knowledge, ed. Michael Kiernan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 76.
15 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 14.
16 Ibid.
17 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 159-160, original emphasis.
18 Ben Shneiderman, “Foreword”, in Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees. Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2014, p. 7-8, here p. 7.
19 M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 26.
20 Ibid., p. 10, p. 42.
21 Ibid., p. 10.
22 Chrétien Frederic Guillaume Roth, Essai d’une distribution des sciences et des arts principaux, from Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (1780), in M. Lima, op. cit., 65.
23 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 15.
24 See Figure 18 in M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 28, which shows a “Porphyrian tree” drawn by thirteenth-century Spanish philosopher Ramon Llull.
25 J. Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. 1.
26 Jean-Pierre Cléro, “Introduction”, Chrestomathia, ed. and transl. Jean-Pierre Cléro, Paris, l’Unebévue, 2004, p. xxxiii-xxxiv, my translation.
27 Ibid., p. lxv.
28 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, Appendix IV, in Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. 139-276.
29 Ibid., p. 214, original emphasis.
30 Ibid., p. 140, original emphasis.
31 Ibid., p. 159, original emphasis.
32 For a critique of attempts at imposing legibility, simplification and centralization onto natural and social spaces since the Enlightenment, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, Yale University Press, [1998] 2020. Interestingly, Scott’s first chapter analyses scientific forestry in late eighteenth-century Prussia and Saxony as a model for the process he seeks to unpack.
33 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, op. cit., p. 151.
34 Ibid., p. 152, original emphasis.
35 Ibid., p. 185.
36 Ibid., p. 166, original emphasis.
37 Jean-Pierre Cléro, “‘Art’ et ‘science’ dans Chrestomathia”, Revue d’études benthamiennes 18, 2020. http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/7808 (all web references last accessed 05/01/2026).
38 J. Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. cit., p. 213, original emphasis.
39 Ibid., p. 216.
40 Ibid., p. 157, original emphasis.
41 J.-P. Cléro, “‘Art’ et ‘science’”, art. cit.
42 J. Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification”, op. cit., p. 212.
43 Ibid., original emphasis.
44 Christine Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 4, 1991, p. 105-129, here p. 118.
45 M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 97.
46 Ibid. Examples include a 1485 Porphyrian tree of qualities by Jacobus Publicus in Artes orandi, epistolandi, memoranda in which the illustration is meant to be a mnemonic tool, as well as a table of jurisprudence in Christophe de Savigny’s Tableaux accomplis de tous les arts libéraux (1587). For each discipline, the table takes the form of a horizontal tree representing topics and subtopics. Lima argues that “[t]he work was an important development in the visual representation of knowledge and became a key influence in the subsequent classification work of Francis Bacon.” M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 100.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 40.
49 Ibid., p. 33.
50 Ibid. As a legal term, a “substitution” (or “substitutional legacy” or “substitutional gift”) refers to a “legacy that (1) passes to descendants of a beneficiary who is named in a will if this beneficiary has predeceased the testator or (2) passes to other persons by express provisions in the will”. A Dictionary of Law, 10th edn, ed. Jonathan Law, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, consulted on line.
51 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a servitude, in civil law, refers to “a subjection or subserviency of property either: (1) to some definite person other than its owner (‘personal servitude’), or (2) to some definite property other than that of its owner for the benefit of the dominant property (‘praedial servitude’).” J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000. Examples of servitude include “support (of a building by another), way (the dominant owner may cross the servient tenement to and from the dominant tenement) and aqueductus (water may be carried through the servient tenement).” (https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/legal/glossary/servitude).
52 The illustration is to be found in the Sennetoniana, i.e. an illustrated edition of Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis printed in Lyons between 1548 and 1550 by three brothers – Jacques, Jean and Claude Senneton. See fig. 1.18 in Valérie Hayaert, “The Gordian knot of emblemata: from the Labyrinthus absconditus to the affirmation of the Prisca Jurisprudentia” in Genealogies of Legal Vision, ed. Peter Goodrich and Valérie Hayaert, London, Routledge, 2015, p. 47.
53 V. Hayaert, “The Gordian knot”, art. cit., p. 51.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Robert Jacob, Images de la justice : essai sur l’iconographie judiciaire du Moyen âge à l’âge classique, preface by Pierre Truche and Myriam Ezratty, Paris, Le Léopard d’or, 1994, p. 10.
57 Lima suggests that the idea of the tree of life was “appropriated from Jewish, Assyrian and Sumerian traditions”. M. Lima, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 16.
58 R. Jacob, Images de la justice, op. cit., p. 39, my translation.
59 Ibid., p. 39-40, my translation. The role of trees in the myths, rites, and judicial practices in the Germano-Scandinavian traditions is also well-documented. Scandinavian mythology features a primeval ash-tree – called Irminsul in Sweden and Yggdrasil in Iceland – at the foot of which the gods met daily to deliver justice. Significantly, the General Pleas of Sweden – called thing – took place once a year at the Uppsala sanctuary, where an ever-green tree was venerated as the axus mundi (ibid., p. 40-41). The word thing – or Ding in German – refers to a regular assembly which adjudicated ongoing disputes in addition to performing worship functions and which is the first type of court to be found in the Germano-Scandinavian world.
60 Peter Goodrich, An Advanced Introduction to Law and Literature, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, p. 15, original emphasis.
61 Ibid., p. 14.
62 Ibid., p. 15.
63 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, éd. Laurent Versini, 2 vols., Paris, Gallimard/Folio Essais, 1995, vol. 1, p. 341.
64 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a study of English historical thought in the seventeenth century: A Reissue with a Retrospect [1958], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
65 C. Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree”, art. cit., p. 105.
66 Ibid.
67 M. Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée, op. cit., p. 11, my translation.
68 Ibid., p. 12, my translation.
69 V. Hayaert, “The Gordian knot”, art. cit., p. 32.
70 Ibid., p. 43. See Fig. 1.9, p. 37.
71 Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies, ed. Philip Schofield, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
72 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 3.
73 Ibid., p. 5, original emphasis. The first meaning of “pedigree” is “a genealogical stemma or table; a genealogy drawn up or exhibited in some tabular form”, and its second meaning: “one’s line of ancestors; an ancestral line; ancestry; lineage, descent”. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, Oxford English Dictionary, op. cit.
74 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 5.
75 Erik Ketelaar, “The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries”, Libraries & the Cultural Record, 44.1, 2009, p. 9-28, here p. 16.
76 Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005, p. 84, quoted in E. Ketelaar, “The Genealogical Gaze”, art. cit., p. 20.
77 E. Ketelaar, “The Genealogical Gaze”, art. cit., p. 21. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, Stéphane Jettot shows how the eighteenth century’s obsession for genealogy materialized in the production of family directories, i.e. compilations of titles, pedigrees and vignettes of the history of families deemed sufficiently important to be included. The directories were produced in great quantities on a national scale and contributed to the construction of genealogical knowledge. As repositories of family and national memory, they were sometimes deeply contested, for instance when it came to the legitimacy of a child or a family member’s position at the time of the Glorious Revolution.
78 M. Bretin-Chabrol, L’arbre et la lignée, op. cit., p. 10, my translation.
79 Ibid.
80 J. Bentham, Bentham’s Auto-Icon, ed. cit., p. 5.
81 Ibid., p. lxvii.
82 Tsin Yen Koh, “Bad Jokes and Good Taste: an Essay on Bentham’s ‘Auto-Icon’”, Revue d’études benthamiennes, 20, 2021. < http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/9139>.
83 M. Lima, introduction, The Book of Trees, op. cit., p. 27.
84 B. Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers, op. cit., p. 80.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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| Titre | Fig. 1. George Frederick Watts, “Jeremy Bentham in an Imaginary Landscape”, 1835. Oil. 194x143mm. UCL Art Museum, University College London. UCL No: 5580. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22543/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 120k |
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| Titre | Fig.2. From “Table IV. Arbor Porphyriana, seu potius Ramea”. N°I. “The Arbor Porphyriana in its original form; being the forms in which it was transcribed from the copy exhibited in the course of a College Lecture, delivered, Anno 1761, at Queen’s College, Oxford”. Chrestomathia, p. 159. Courtesy of the Bentham Project, UCL. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22543/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 36k |
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| Titre | Fig. 3. From “Table IV. Arbor Porphyriana, seu potius Ramea”. N°II. The Arbor Porphyriana in a supposed amended form: more explicit, and supposed to be, in other respects, now somewhat improved. Chrestomathia, p. 159. Courtesy of the Bentham Project, UCL. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22543/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 32k |
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| Titre | Fig. 4. Jeremy Bentham. “Arboric tabulation system” (undated). Bentham Papers. Box 96, folio 221. UCL Special Collections, UCL Archives, London. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22543/img-4.jpg |
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Claire Wrobel, « Thinking with Trees: Philosophical and Legal Genealogies in “Auto-Icon” and Other Texts by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/22543 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fv
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