Cassirer's Renaissance Orientation: Metaphor as the Vital Knot of Experience

Orientation. Cassirer, remember, characterised the Renaissance through the idea of an orientation to affairs of the mind, one which incorporates quite diverse contributions within a certain direction. In this chapter our concern has centred upon the philosophy of this period, with particular respect to religion and poetry. With regard to both of these, we cannot talk of an achievement in the sense of a scientific discovery or an invention; in our progress through the aesthetic or the religious, what is of concern is the nature of our orientation, for art is endless and religion a matter of faith and devotion: we seek to change our own orientation to life through poetic and religious exercise. The more we are devoted to these worlds, the more we receive their sense of wholeness and a sense of completion, an identity which places us within the human situation. The abandonment of self-concern is the journey to the self’s completion.

The Situation. The human situation is the outcome of our making and finding a world. Our making the world is an attempt to find that which can guide us and be our measure. We are what our measure is. The measure affirms our innermost being, but it is other than our self, for we have made it only when we find it. The supreme gift given to us is the sense of an absolute - ultimately, of the idea of universal love - that can be called upon to influence the actuality of our lives. The human task is to live through the circumstances of our life to discover and act according to the “knot” of experience in which the distinction between the subjective and the objective has no jurisdiction.

The Metaphor. Metaphor is the primary form of thought through which the journey is made. It is the beating heart of the aesthetic and the religious, for only metaphor allows their stories to have force. Their truth of something absolute is not to be understood as existing external to the self that searches. Think of it, instead, as akin to that taken-for-granted world from which thought makes its excursions, the pre-reflective world in which we discover examples of the truth we seek for the sake of our own identity. The metaphor of the seed that must be planted within the earth charges you to reflect upon its applicability to your own life. One example of metaphor may be sufficient for you to extend its significance to the world at large and for it acquire a meaning that transcends particular circumstances to become a rule for living. The metaphor is twofold, pointing to a physical reality (the seed, the plant) which indicates an idea of how to live, through the free play of the imagination.

Inwardness/Outwardness. The enjoyment of a metaphor depends upon your looking outwards to the world and simultaneously inwards to your self. This is the work of finding an identity. The early stages of humanity’s development answered that requirement through the attribution of names to the world: thunder was the expression of the god, Jupiter; the “Ancestors” of the Australian aborigines were located in the landscape as sacred places. In the Renaissance, with its emphasis upon our making the world, we begin to discern a recognition of a challenge: that we must ourselves make a spiritual journey to participate with a transcendent other that defines our identity. We are no longer in that frame of mind, within which we simply express our affiliation to the gods. Now, we must make and find these ideas as a reflection of our experience, so that they can reveal what lies beyond our selves, yet is ourselves. We must speak and think poetically in the "language which forges ahead in its ever-changing historical nature”.

The Principle of Unity in Difference. Let’s return to Bateson’s distinction between “a difference” and “a difference that makes a difference”. Metaphor is an example of the latter. For example, there is a clear distinction between the nature of the human mind and the nature of seeds that produce plants. We place the two in quite different categories. But metaphor is not categorical thinking. It overrides (negates) the classificatory distinctions to form its unity of natural and human being. We have seen how Nicholas of Cusa resolved the difference between the idea of the absolute - the divine - and the circumstantial nature of everyday life by positing a “vital knot of experience” that united the sacred with the profane. The knot is his metaphor of a unity of experience, the sacred within the profane, a unity beyond the divisions normally evident in society, and in our own minds. The distinct qualities of the sacred and of the secular are not denied; on the contrary, it is the possible unity of the differences that constitutes the task of being human. Turning round Bateson’s aphorism, we might say that only a human unity that is both ultimate and tolerant can make all the difference.

Pluralism and the Absolute. That unity of tolerance of differences and the singularity of the absolute may, if it is pursued with philosophical rigour, lead to a welcome pluralism, in which apparently competing perspectives can be aligned to suggest an over-arching universality. I have in mind, here, that humanity has made many competing human Faiths that have often been at war with one another, each the "one true way”. Perhaps, if we think that each of these may suggest a unifying orientation, we might see each as a contribution to the enlightenment of the potential goodness of human being.

This venture would consist, first, with the recognition gained by the "learned ignorance” that Cusanus recommended - we recognise the fragility of our knowledge and, consequently, assert that the word "true” does not rest upon a vision that cannot be shared by other Faiths: beneath Faiths is the idea of faith. The idea of transcendence, of that which is beyond you, yet yourself, is the universal principle of faith itself, one which descends upon us in a variety of forms: in the parent’s care for the child, in our sharing concerns with others, in works of art, and in those experiences which we say "come out of the blue” - those special situations in which the distinction between subject and object loses its force, and in which there is no possessiveness or sense of division.

References:
Auerbach, E. (2007). Dante: Poet of the secular world. New York Review of Books. Baranski, Z. G., & Cachey, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, metaphysics, tradition. Notre Dame Press.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago University Press.
Cassirer, E. (1961). The logic of the humanities. Yale University Press.

Cassirer, E. (1964). The individual and the cosmos in renaissance philosophy. Harper and Row.
Corbin, H. (1997). Alone with the alone: Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton University Press.
Dewey, J. (1931). Philosophy and civilisation. Baluch and Company.

Vico's New Science: Auerbach's "Copernican Moment" in Philosophy & the Power of Poetic Universals

Auerbach (2014) has credited the New Science of Giambattista Vico as "a Copernican moment” in the history of Philosophy, one that suggests the possibility of a shift in perspective or a new paradigm. That judgment is, I shall attempt to demonstrate, an accurate one. But, even today, the acknowledgment of that status has not penetrated the mainstream of philosophical thought, although in the last fifty years an increasing number of scholars have highlighted the radical significance of Vico’s work.

A central element of that radicalism is Vico’s contention that the subject-matter of Philosophy itself demands an interdisciplinary approach which places the study of mind within an historical and social framework. We can understand how the human mind comes to “define”, “expand” and thus “situate” itself through a history of its various forms of expression: from societies centred around religion and myth, to the Patriarchies which divide the chosen few from the many, to the modern demand for equity in society. But these stages of mind and society should not be thought of as a progression which leaves behind the “primitive”; for Vico, what he calls the “poetic universals” of the first religious and mythical stage do not fade from the mind with the advent of reflection but remain with us as ways in which we make sense of our being in the world. On this account, Philosophy should not pursue its deliberations isolated from the empirical data of science. Its task becomes one of thinking through the implications of these original forms of understanding, of which the logic of objective reason is but one part, in a secondary reflection aimed at its own integration in life itself.

Berlin (2013) characterises Vico as a critic of the Enlightenment. That is the case. But it would be a great injustice simply to allocate him a place in the Counter-Enlightenment. So large is his vision, that his thoughts not only provide the foundations of today’s Social Sciences; arguably, given today’s dominance of a technological world-view in which the human is a part of an essentially mechanical whole, we have a greater need for a Vichian perspective that persuades us of the value of poetic universals in the perception and appreciation of an encompassing whole. How was it that Vico could formulate such radical and original ideas against the dominance of the Rationalism which favoured the logical and objective as its central concern?

The answer, of course, is hard work (“twenty five years”, says Vico) and genius. Looking back from the vantage point of the present, we can understand that Vico’s emphasis on the significance of the poetic was anticipated by authors from Dante onwards. The "new paradigm" that Auerbach refers to has, like all new paradigms, an anticipatory history. Vico’s great achievement was twofold: he placed the poetic imagination within the actuality of human history as a significant contribution both to cultural development and to our sense of a human identity; he also understood the significance of the poetic imagination in the pragmatic persuasions of rhetoric.

Vico was Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. Rhetoric, understood as eloquence in argument, was then an important part of the education of the legal profession, and it was Vico’s remit to teach how the practice of eloquence could advance a legal argument through presentations that would enhance a desired outcome of judgment. For example, one of the rhetorical practices that Vico taught was metaphor. At its basic level, metaphor is some kind of comparison between two things - "my love is like a red, red rose" - but it can also be a comparison of two or more relationships, "a conceit": John Donne’s, "speak your love, else a Great Prince in Prison lies", casts the mute lover as a potential Prince who is a prisoner of his own muteness.

Vico argued that such conceits could exert a powerful influence in any argument because it is the listener who makes the connection between the two relations of Prince and Lover. The connection is not a logical deduction but an implication of feeling. Do we not have in this usage an important source for his New Science? For, on the one hand, the philosopher, like the lawyer, must be attuned to the complexities of the secular world - it’s singularities and its laws - and, on the other, the task does not depend upon reason alone: it can be productively accompanied by the eloquence of the poetic. This synergy of practical reason and poetry is, I believe, at the centre of Vico’s philosophy.

Vico's Eternal Light: The Human-Made Civil World & Knowable Sensus Communis

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by man, and that its principles are therefor to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects upon this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God has made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men have made it, men could come to know. (Vico, 1976, section 331, p. 96)

That first sentence alone reveals the radical nature of Vico’s philosophy. The recognition that ‘we make’ our human world announces both our freedom and our fallibility. It invites us to reflect upon our achievements in order to understand their coherence and their historical development. This historical reflection necessitates attention to the evidence that we can glean from the study of ancient cultures in order to interpret its significance for the history of culture: this interpretation of evidence, found in records of social practices such as divination and sacrifice, but also in the original meaning of words in early societies, is the task of philology, whilst the task of philosophy is to place this evidence in a framework which demonstrates an historical unity of humanity within the diversity of customs.

What makes this endeavour possible is the continued presence in the human mind of such “modulations”: this word is precise; it suggests necessary variations of consciousness, of the ways in which the self-encounters its environment, which are a general capacity of consciousness itself. As such, they retain their existential significance: we can participate in them through our reflection upon them. Their order of appearance in our history is a consequence of the development of ways in which self and world transform from an undifferentiated to a differentiated perspective. This is a unity which differentiates itself into distinct forms of experience which retain their lasting value as necessary forms of our existence.

The notion of ‘participation’ is important also in another sense, namely, that the defining experiences of forms of being in the world occur for the individual within a social group - the family, the clan, society - groups in which a principle of sharing is already established. The principle arises, not through the considered statement of a social contract, but from the pragmatism of social life - the pragmatics that favour collective survival and the continuation of the species through the family and the larger social group.

Vico’s philosophy attaches particular importance to this body of social practices and its underlying knowledge, referring to it as the sensus communis; it is the tacit framework within which a society goes about its business, occupying a relatively stable, middle ground between the sacred and the profane. Of course, such a centre is not uniform: contradictory points of view constantly appear, and solutions found through the exercise of common sense or the interpretation of law. But the prudence of common sense and the idea of rules of law are themselves a late part of a developmental sequence which has its roots in the “thick darkness” of earliest antiquity.