Vico's Poetic Universals vs. Barbarism of Reflection: Reclaiming Sensus Communis

We cannot live the mind of the first human. All that we can do is tell a story in which those characteristics that appear to be most human - religion, language, family, and the making of culture - are somehow inherent in our beginning, so that events of origin lead naturally to such phenomena. We have to use our imaginations. For Vico, the two options of "the noble savage” or the social contract merely indicated what needed to be explained about an origin; they are accomplishments that do not account for their own origin. It is, I think, typical of his thinking that he should seek his own originating myth in events beyond human control, events so shocking as to precipitate quite unforeseen developments. He imagines survivors of the Biblical flood reduced to the level of beasts by their circumstances:

Thereupon a few giants, who must have been the most robust, and who were dispersed through the forests on the mountain heights where the strongest beasts have their dens, were frightened and astonished by the great effect [lightening] whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect, and because in that state their nature was that of men all of robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus, they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder. (Vico, 1976, section 375, p. 116)

In fear and trembling, the sky is perceived as an animated body emitting light and noise, to which these first humans could respond with matching noises; the animated body is given a name that is shared by the group, the name of a god who "talks” to us. The beginnings of three fundamental aspects of humanity are combined here: the sense of a power beyond us (religion), our capacity to relate to it through forms of expression (language), and the social cohesion that allows the shared experiences of religion and language. We witness here the force of Vico’s contention that these foundational aspects of being human are both present at the first thought and the source of its historical development. For the idea of Jove would sink back into the flux of sensations if it were not given a name shared by the group, but it is around Jove (as that power which lies beyond us) that society builds its shared concerns. For Vico, Jove is a "poetic” or "imaginative universal”.

Whilst Western philosophy has by and large encouraged us to believe that a universal can only be a category - a class of identical or similar particulars - poetic imagination works through metaphor to suggest a unity. In its first appearance metaphor is the assertion of an identity: it asserts one thing ‘is’ another (without the contrary assertion that it ‘is not’). Since "the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect”, the god, Jove, takes on the character of a powerful figure whose moods are recognisably human. (In later periods gods were differentiated by more specific characteristics: Hera as the god of courage and war, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility, for example). Metaphor is essentially interpretation, a divination of things and events that exemplifies their significance for the life that we live and creates narratives for individuals within societies that order and guide their conduct.

Thrcke (2013) in his Philosophy of Dreams identifies the metaphorical as the essential structure of dreams, arguing that their two major attributes, condensation and displacement, working together, produce the defining symbolic character of a dream. Condensation concentrates significant, usually disturbing, experiences, which are then displaced onto other experiences which often seem to have no discernible relation to each other. For Psychoanalysis, the metaphorical nature of the dream serves to repress a potentially disturbing, hidden meaning. Repression serves wish-fulfilment, the wish not to confront an experience. But Freud later noted, there are cases which do not seem to follow this rule. In particular, he observed that soldiers who had witnessed the most horrifying and frightful events in war persisted in dreams that repeated the experience again and again. Here was behaviour that appears beyond the scope of wish-fulfilment. In fact, as Thrcke argues, a wish remains in these cases, the wish to escape fear, but the experience is beyond repression and concealment: it does not require further condensation and cannot be displaced.

Repression always requires two things: the power of repression and a thing that allows itself to be repressed. Repression is not a primal mechanism of the psyche. It has a chance only in zones of moderate stimulus. Full traumatic assault makes a mockery of it and permits only one response. Those who are affected are forced to repeat it for as long as it takes to lessen its sting. (2013, p. 44)

The only outlet for it, contradictory though this seems, is repetition. There is no repression or hiding of the fear, but its repeated re-enaction in the dream engenders some kind of habituation; the patient becomes accustomed to it, neural pathways become established that, perhaps, have the effect of turning the drama into a ritual which “frames” the trauma as an episode in one’s history, a new narrative, as it were.

Such dreams are attempts at self-healing. The dream has internalised the trauma, in a sense, brought it to mind for its expression. It is not, therefor, the primal experience of trauma: before the capacity for internalisation the trauma and its “cure” must have taken an external, dramatic form if it were to be effective. Thrcke identifies the practice of sacrifice, ritual slaughter, as the first human form of response to counter the persistence of severe trauma. The mythology of ancient cultures allots a central place to this practice. The Greek word rezein expresses a recognition of the significance of sacrifice, for it means both “to make a sacrifice” and also, in general, “to do, to be active”. Making a sacrifice is taken to be an essential aspect of human behaviour. It is traumatic repetition compulsion in the form, not of the dream, but of action. Just as the dream of traumatic repetition turns flight away from the source of fear towards it, so the ritual of sacrifice reverses the fear towards its affirmation in the sacrificial ritual.

Thrcke points out that the word ritual comes from the Sanskrit rta which means the same as “solid existence, support, right” - signifying that everything is done in the right way. In order to achieve that condition, the ritual should occur in a special place, perhaps at the centre of the settlement, but certainly one marked off as an “exemplary” space, exemplary both in the sense of the space itself and the practices reserved for that space, slaughter and burial. And that is the most disturbing contradiction of all: to possess the fury to kill one’s own kin and then to remember them with an honourable burial.

Vico says “Thus it was fear which created gods in the world; not fear awakened by men in other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves” (Vico, 1976, p. 382). This is a remarkable statement, because it appears to suggest that, in addition to the fear which arises from the natural world, men can create or “make” a fear that satisfies the need to respond to that primal fear - the fear which confers a sort of control over events through acting them ‘out’. We can understand how the original fear produces a common focus and a common feeling, as Verene (1981) says. But, without Thrcke’s analysis, we cannot understand ‘why’ humans turn this fear onto themselves in the self-aggression of the blood ritual. Only traumatic repetition allows us to do this. When there is no escape, fear must be directed towards a man-made focus which represents its displacement in an activity played out, and thus controlled, according to the rules devised by the participants. This is the kind of “escape” described as the origin and development of culture by Ortega y Gasset: the world made by humanity, as “a detour which must be taken in order to bring the immediate into focus”. The detour is that which produces culture: religious and social practices, language, values, and the study of culture itself in the humanities and science.

We can discern, then, in the era of the gods, the first appearance of the three interrelated capacitators necessary for the beginning of culture: the symbol, the divine, and social consensus. But at this first stage, we can only talk of these features as part of a narrative which "plays out” the original experience through action and gesture - a preceding communal "dance”, the sacrifice, and burial. The symbol is the action by which the collective obeys its gods. It has not yet developed into either an image or the spoken word that can concentrate the experience in itself and unite people in their observance of it. In this respect the development of the species follows the same path as development of the individual within society with a progression from action through imagery to language.

The progression releases the mind from its dependence upon the here-and-now; the symbol, no longer attached to an immediate experience, can be freely related to others both in the metaphorical imagery of the Arts and the objective or functional discourse of the Sciences. In the second age, the age of heroes, a new freedom of mind begins to emerge. In this new narrative stage, the messages of the gods are displayed to and interpreted through the chosen few, namely, the heroes who carry the divine message. What was formerly beyond the human becomes a significant power exercised by the chosen; on the one hand, the shamans, priests, and oracles, on the other, the patriarchs of the civil order. Whilst the age of gods could be understood as the realm of metaphor, this new stage was that of metonymy; whereas metaphor defined a unity of humans with their gods, metonymy situates the god-like within the few who embody it. The society is now defined in terms of the difference between those who contain this quality (that is, those who embody the metaphor) and those who do not: the fully human and the less than human.

Metonymy and social structure go hand in hand. The chosen are the patriarchs who claim possession of the secret symbols of religion. Their families extend their power to hold exclusive rights both to the divination of auspices and to religiously sanctioned ceremonies. Those without power exchange their liberty for the protection and guidance of the patriarch, who is gifted with certain knowledge of the will of the gods, the legitimacy of children, and the social status of the plebs. The institutions of the heroic age, Isaiah Berlin emphasises, imposed a harsh discipline upon the subjects of the patriarchs whose defence of liberty was in aid of their liberty, not that of their dependents; the form of government was severely autocratic, involving the strict punishment of disobedient plebeians.

As Schaefer (2019) points out, Vico understood that equity depends upon literacy, since the demand for equity implies the value of a principle whose effectiveness depends upon an explicit, written statement which can form the basis for argument. He repeatedly affirms that the plebs wanted written laws while the patriarchs wished to keep them secret and did so through the secret sessions of the courts. The significant breakthrough occurs when the plebs gain access to sacred marriages and to the rights of inheritance equal to that of the patricians. In the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables such "solemn marriages” were restricted to the patricians, but nine years after the formulation of the Tables, a law was enacted which allowed for the intermarriage of plebs and patricians, so that the former gained equal rights with the latter.

The formation of written law arrives, of course, at the later stages of the struggle for equity, and the earlier stages of the struggle for equity would have been greeted with oppression by the patricians. Similarly, we should not suppose that finality is achieved in the modern age of men; on the contrary, the desire for equity continues to engender a relentless and in many cases undoubtedly worthy pursuit on behalf of social groups designated in some way as having inferior status. Rightly, we refuse to accept any such discrimination on the basis of such things as class or gender or religion.

Vico, however, takes a much darker view; that each age may be seen as an advance in a certain respect, but each also contains a one-sidedness that eventually undermines it. The metaphor of the asserted identity of gods and men is ultimately inadequate to express the power of humanity to make its own culture, and the concentration of the metaphor in the persons of the patriarch and priest (metonymy) leads the way to the struggle towards the eventual recognition of equity as a universal principle. We can readily understand that it is a desire for changes in the structure of society, not philosophical reflection, that accounts for these paradigm shifts. For Vico, the drive for equity increasingly shifts the focus of argument to a second-order language which analyses language of the first order and thus undermines the largely, taken-for-granted world of social consensus.

The concrete reality of the consensus, developed through our everyday transactions, is transformed and distorted into a world of abstractions ruled by the logic of classes rather than the poetic logic of the first two stages. In the logic of classes individuals (particulars) are grouped into a shared identity (a whole) because they have "something” in common that distinguishes them from other classes. In classification, difference is a logical consequence of commonality, whereas metaphor is fundamentally the assertion of a felt identity retained in the difference between two things; to say, for example, "Rome is a fortress” is to point to the "fortress character” of Rome as a situation which affords security from attack and it is that character which leads to other things which may be a fortress - an aeroplane which is a "Flying Fortress” or a person who is "your fortress” or a computer program which safeguards your data. Even a prison can become a fortress in some circumstances. The metaphor works, then, through the extension of feeling from one situation to the next. Metaphors chart your course through the symbolic world. Vico does not deny the value of the of classificatory knowledge; indeed, as we shall see, he argues for its integration with poetic logic, but he does deny the idea that its advent into human consciousness necessitates the rejection of the metaphorical thinking of the two earlier stages. This rejection he terms "the barbarism of reflection”.

He identifies the barbarism as ironic. To speak ironically is to deceive, for you do not directly say what you mean. Irony is a symptom of a division in the representation of reality - the mind and its object lose that direct relationship which forms the essence of the metaphor. Whilst the metaphor affirms in a re-presentation or “re-presencing” of reality that engages the mind, irony, working through its indirectness, fosters a second-order language which draws attention to the ‘working’ of the meaning. Of course, this capacity, viewed from the perspective of the development of the joint differentiation of self and object, is a significant advance; irony presupposes that we can “stand back” from our concepts to examine them.

There would be no Science (in its largest Vichian sense) without this reflection. Furthermore, we can also recognise the great strength of the ironic in its support of the eloquence of an argument or of poetry itself: irony becomes a sort of playfulness within the context of a serious purpose, requiring that purpose for its effectiveness. But, imagine a world in which irony held sway without the context of a serious purpose: collective meaning would be undermined, and the anarchy of doubt would feature strongly in our literature: think Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Orwell, as “entertainments” which accurately reflect a new reality and one can appreciate Vico’s concern. Vico characterises this fallen state as one of an excessive self-interest:

For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus, no matter how great the throng of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. (Vico, 1976, section 1106, pp. 423-424)

The barbarism of reflection results in a lost or broken social consensus. The dominance of purely objective reflection undermines and makes redundant the consensus which, however divisive, unites individuals in the pursuit of a common purpose: gods, heroes, priests, patricians and plebs were figures in a world of shared concern. Vico calls this consensus the sensus communis - it is the sense or viewpoint which forms whatever unity a society possesses, a unity which encompasses the different viewpoints within a society, often opposed and contradictory, but nevertheless agrees on the “terms” of social intercourse: it is the memory of a society formed through custom and language.

The word, “terms”, suggesting some kind of explicit or even legal binding, is, of course, misleading, since the unity of an era, of gods, heroes, or men, is not derived from or dependent upon any objective classification, the work of objective reflection which results in Vico’s intelligible universals, but arises from the poetic universals of the imagination. For Vico, these universals are common to all nations, referring as they do to the universal tasks of all societies, namely, those of reaching consensus with respect to the fundamental problems of existence But it is not the model of objective reflection apparent in objective thought that is the major force in any suppression of the metaphorical outlook on life; it is the enormously powerful conjunction of science with technology which has unleashed the dominance of technique in what Verene calls the functional or technical concept. This trend began in earnest in the industries developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in his Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson distinguished the two dominant features of the technical: its constant production of new and superior techniques, and the way in which it transforms the user into the used, the subject becoming a subsidiary function within a purely functional system.

Verene (1964) describes the social psychology of this system in relation to Vico’s three fundamental concepts, fantasia or imagination, ingegno or ingenuity, and memoria or memory. Referring to the work of Elull (1967) he argues that the framework for life provided by the concept of technique divorces ingenuity from its original bond with memory and imagination and becomes malicious because it lacks the narrative, self-involving meaning supplied by imagination operating within the sensus communis. The wisdom brought about by the consensus of shared custom and language is submerged under the consciousness of technique which breaks the continuity of past, present and future: its inner being, its spirit, is one of ‘escape’ - from the earth and the limitations of the body, and from any earnest contemplation of the present by an endless pursuit of the novelty and variety of the consumable. Not surprisingly, this dispersion of the self is accompanied by an acute longing for personal identity. The identity fostered by the technological world view is that of the explorer, whether of space or the must-have, new gadget. But variety requires identity, the part, a sense of the whole, and that perennial human need is given a greater and more intense significance with the decline in the common bond. Vico’s "deep solitude of spirit” results in human conflict, but at the same time it points to its cure. He argues that humanity must reach the extreme of reflective barbarism for the few survivors of the apocalypse to return to the integration of imagination and ingenuity within a new sensus communis.

Vico could not have predicted the advance of technology to its central place in modern life. But he would not have been surprised by the emergence of this radical change ‘as a consequence’ of the success of the stage of human development in which it occurs, for his view is that a shift in identity is driven by opposition present within each stage. His philosophy is a dialectical narrative of forms of identity that can ‘only’ be grounded in the poetic imagination. Whilst, then, we are yet to arrive at that extremity of reflective barbarism that excludes the poetic, we might take courage from our own awareness of the need for an identity that reclaims the poetic imagination for a new and more inclusive common sense.

Even though this need is obstructed by the larger, detrimental forces of contemporary society, a philosophy which simply observed this phenomenon as a “fact” would be a dereliction of the spirit of a philosophy which aims, not only at self-knowledge, but also at ethical behaviour and social justice. In particular, we should, I believe, follow Verene’s insight that “Vico’s new science is a kind of wisdom in an age dominated by the barbarism of reflection” (1981, p. 196). He points to Jacques Ellul’s contention that a technologically driven society may be characterised as an “ensemble of means” which works through "efficient ordering” of the procedures to be followed to attain a desired end - a methodology, indifferent to value and thus useful for production lines and social control. Such a society has lost the wisdom that resides in the give-and-take of social consensus, where a variety of often contradictory views may be argued through, deploying all the mind’s capacities so that discourse is grounded in imagination and guided by memory and reason.

Earlier I described imagination as the intelligence of feeling. A feeling responds to and interprets a perceived situation; a feeling relates directly to a whole, the situation, whereas reason forms its whole through analysis of its parts. The former is dialectical, the latter systematic, and the two combine in any creative work. From this perspective, a society becomes barbaric when the balance between the two joint aspects of mind is lost in either a barbarism of reflection or a barbarism of feeling: the centre does not hold. However, there is surely no evidence in modern life that the barbarism of reflection results in a deprivation of imagination; works of art and drama are ever-present, and there are many worthy appeals for the place of imagination in education. Imagination fulfils the human need to be "situated”, to have a place in the course of events in the same way that early societies revolved around a material space regarded as special and sacred. The functionality of the technological age erases that space; we can no longer gather ourselves together in the shared concerns that give life a larger meaning, that of a situation that can be judged appropriate to our nature, for the idea of a constant nature is denied in an eternity defined by novelty and escape. It is as though our human qualities flourish but now circulate around a void, a centre in which the question of how we situate ourselves in our human nature no longer exists. Musil defined his "man without qualities” as consisting of "qualities without a man”; we circulate as character-parts in a dream-like emptiness of not knowing who we are.

But our perceiving the world merely as an ensemble of functions is leading to its destruction. The Market, driven by the technical worldview and unregulated consumerism, shows no sympathy for the realities of the natural world. Throughout human development we have defined ourselves in relation to that world, seeing it as god-like and ourselves as heroes; now, its material destruction parallels our spiritual decline. This alone should signal to us the precarious and tragic character of the stage of irony, one, you will remember, defined as our not speaking directly to one another. But that is exactly what we need to do: we need to find speech that arises directly from experience for any genuine intersubjectivity to exist. We may not have yet reached the final phase of irony in which feelings of revulsion return us to a life fully imagined, but we are certainly beyond the stage in which the gentle practice of enlightened selfinterest can draw humankind back from the abyss.

Vico’s philosophical anthropology returns us to the earth through a narrative of the metaphors which bind us to it. The narrative is at once personal and interpersonal, the “I" of much traditional philosophy supported by the “we" of an intersubjective world. The radical originality of Vico’s thinking is to place philosophy within the realm of human experience itself, thereby centrally situating the discipline within a social and empirical context. On this view, the philosophy of our understanding of self and world does not begin with the impartial observer, for that world is not ‘made’ impartially but as a response to the challenges of life. Nor does it not commit itself to the objective of this observer, that of finding an explicit solution to the question of what it is to be human, as if to prescribe a medicine, for Vico returns thought to the life of the sensus communis, which absorbs life’s contradictory events in their challenging particularity and recognises that sometimes, in the words of Leonard Cohen, there just “ain’t no cure for love”. One can test the assertions of science and technology through acts of prediction and observation, because the effectiveness of these methods rests upon the absence of an interfering self-view. On the other hand, where the truth of our identity is at stake, the quest for truthfulness is for the self to discover how it may be true to itself.

Vico's Vital Knot: Poetic Gesture, Metaphor & the Crisis of Modern Meaning

The radical nature of Vico’s thought was not immediately apparent. It stands apart from the two major streams of thought that have dominated the centuries after his death: the contrasting views of the empiricist and the idealist. The contemporary scientist and philosopher would see no need to make a choice between an emphasis upon either experience or ideas: they would assume that both are at play: “facts” need the form of ideas to be meaningful and ideas need facts to come into being. We have seen that the distinctiveness of Vico’s thought, and the absence of its acknowledgment, lies in a quite fundamental acceptance of both experience and idea in the developing life of the mind. But note, the sensuous in his case is neither the particular fact of Locke, the empiricist, nor the already-formed elements of Descartes’ logic of rational procedure.

The unity of the two is, on the contrary, an actuality, an occurrence, in the life of the first human who responds to the idea of a god with a shout that becomes a name. This may not be the “idea” of the philosopher in his study who holds the idea before his mind, as it were, for the purpose of exploring its relation to other ideas, but it is the idea as gesture which brings the sensuous to its meaning: the hidden becomes “unhidden”. Verene (1981) takes up Cassirer’s interpretation of the signifying gesture as one that includes the twin aspects of ‘pointing’ to the object and a ‘mimetic’ gesture which imitates in a different medium what is meant:

We find two phenomena; the body takes the world up into its own medium and mimetically presents something that is meant, such as folded hands for sleep or fluid movements for water, or the body sets itself off from the world by the pointing finger. Here the same gesture is used where anything is meant. Pointing is always the same gesture repeated on different objects. The pointing finger and the mimetic movement are both directions taken within the first mute language of Jove. Jove can be apprehended as nature, pointed at affixed in the sky. He can also be read as a sign, imitated in a ritual of fearful shaking. In the mimetic gesture or ritual act Jove can be transferred as a medium into a different medium. He is grasped as a metaphor. (1981, p. 210)

This twofold gesture of pointing and imitation in response to the “gestures” of the world is the first human enlightenment from which all else follows. The separation of subject and object that begins with pointing, the isolation of something “out there”, together with a response of imitation with its assertion of identity, is the beginning of all language, both poetic and objective. It is that “vital knot of experience” Cassirer refers to in his discussion of the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa as the original experience in which the distinctions between subject and the object, the creating and the created, the naming and the named, are “tied together” ‘before’ their subsequent differentiation.

This is the metaphor doing its work of producing an identity inclusive of “is” but not yet “is not”. We should think of it as a metaphor that is essentially lived as the mind in the body, with the two mind/bodies of human and Jove occupying the same world and thus united in their difference. That "same world” is both “made” by ourselves and at the same time experienced as primarily a hidden world that is larger than and hidden from ourselves. It is from that hiddenness that our sense of "something other than our self which is our self” arises. We should not, therefor, conceive hiddenness simply as a negative to our positive endeavours - that which has to be overcome. We communicate with Jove, we share a language, but he remains hidden from us. The poetic mind values that unspoken hiddenness. Its metaphors respond to the sense of an implicit wholeness which is the source of our experience beyond expression, one allowing us to experience the emergence of a meaning from that which is, and must be, beyond ourselves, for only then can it transport us beyond ourselves.

This is the world that Vico creates for us with the application of his two principles of inquiry: be guided by the material that provides the subject-matter of your study and trace its history back to the events of its origin. That beginning is our entry into a symbolic world, experienced first in its poetic nature, in which language, culture, and religion necessarily emerge as a unity. Language is the instrument of the shared concerns of a culture which seeks the validation of its acts in religious belief and ceremony.

The terrors of the natural world that lie beyond human control, terrors judged to be the work of a god, are controlled, paradoxically, through their repetition in the human work of ritual sacrifice. We can achieve some understanding of the great trauma of sacrifice if we become fully aware that the group, putting to death its own members, was destroying the bonds that existed within families or acquaintances. This is not the traumatic repetition compulsion of the dream of the war veteran; it is a repetition of trauma enacted in its brutality by the social group ‘against’ its own members. The tragic is always a loss of something valued, giving the memory of a bond broken. One can understand that only religious observance can exist as a corrective to socially determined murder; the choice of a sacred place and the ritual ceremony of burial, providing an encompassing cathartic narrative of care, are also necessary parts of this ritual: love’s defeat, love’s survival.

In the subsequent history of sacrifice we can discern two parallel developments: the movement from this early symbolism of gestures through the iconic to the linguistic, and a movement towards increasing internalisation in which sacrifice becomes an individual, ethical choice of a personal sacrifice in pursuit of a greater good. The demand for universal equity in the age of men inevitably results, not in universal fellowship, but in a greater sense of the individual self. The personal "I” becomes clearly distinct from any collective "we”, and this can happily go hand in hand with the most extreme partisanship. In thinking our way back to the source, then, we should not impose the weight of our form of distinction between the "I” and the "we” on the earlier consciousness.

Our great need for personal identity would not be recognised is a society which sees little or no divergence between its needs and those of the individual; there is just no need for personal autonomy when a shared narrative of origin and practice joins individual with society. All the evidence from studies of indigenous societies and from societies in which the secular is a mirror of the sacred confirm this conclusion. Our present condition? What sense can we make now of Vico’s common sense of a society as that centre which stores our memories, regulates our practice wisely, and forms a basis for our continued explorations? And if, in the famous words of Yeats, the "centre does not hold”, can we imagine an alternative reality which will hold? Not, I think, from the knowledge and power of science allied to technology, nor from the exercise of the imagination when our aesthetics does not stimulate consideration of virtue and belief. We must reclaim a wisdom of understanding guided by the poetic stance towards the world, in which the self can once more define itself in an appreciation of that which, situated beyond each self, announces the prospect of a universal human fellowship.

But is this last sentence not an illicit modernisation of Vico? First, how can the idea of "a universal human fellowship” be reconciled with his view that the search for equity in the age of the barbarism of reflection necessarily results in anarchy, decline, and a return to a world in which the gods are not present to us? Can the fate of an ultimate anarchy leading to its reversal be supplanted by concerted acts of opposition that lead to such a fellowship? Secondly, can humanity ever possibly agree in its interpretation of that vague assertion of something "situated beyond each self”? Can there be a "broad church” that incorporates not only the variety of religious institutions but also welcomes those for whom the idea of "something beyond ourselves” exists, as it were, as the final statement, the last word, which recognises that any further attempt at definition descends into objectivism with all its divisiveness?

Vico’s characterisation of the modern age and its search for equity among individuals and sub-groups of society has the status of a taken-for-granted truth in contemporary theories of alienation and of a broken society. We have seen that he relates this brokenness to the victory of objective thinking over the poetic. What he could not envisage, writing before the Industrial Revolution, was how the developments of capitalism embedded inequality in the institutions that control society to the extent that opposition became the only way of restoring an equitable balance. That opposition has not succeeded, but it has not yet succumbed totally to the apathy of consumerism; protest, too, is a salient feature of modernity. Vico is correct in drawing our attention to a deficit in our thinking, but the argument for equity is everywhere apparent and for the most part valid. The target of Vico’s criticism was not equity as such but the undue dominance of the objective-technical mind that has accompanied its emergence. It is not inconceivable that our protests in favour of an equitable society, now isolated from each other, could, once united in a new social consensus, sponsor the return of a symbolic world in which the poetic could once more confer its significance upon the everyday.

Vico confronts us with a paradox: he believes in God, but he also believes the human concept of God to be “made”. God, as Cusanus said, cannot be known, being beyond all humanly restricted knowledge. Clearly, God is not made into an object, but is of our making, and in that case our attention must turn towards the manner of that making which, we have seen, is poetry. Now poetry, as Emily Dickinson puts it, does not express its central meaning directly; its speech is “slant”, indirect, for its parts always suggest, never define, the whole that is both our centre and our circumference. Poetry always leaves something to be said. It gives us a sense of a hidden source that nurtures both the world’s giving and our striving, the grace of blessing, the nobility of the purpose, which are the same. A poem, a work of art, music and dance, are expressions from that source: poetry gives voice to the source in the richness of its plurality. More paradox. How is it that this mysterious, invisible source which resists the objective gaze comes to define our identity, the centre of our being? I am reminded of the story of an American academic who, exploring the customs of an indigenous tribe, asked: “But what do you do when you disagree?”. To which the interviewee replied, “Well, we dance!” Witness here the wisdom of avoiding an unnecessary divisiveness, a tolerance of difference around a centre which holds fast, and a recognition of the ultimate significance of the acts of poetic expression as that which unites.

Lewis (2015) in the last paragraph of his ‘The Problem of Pain’ offers a Christian description of this dance:

The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it death. But when it flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance “makes heaven drowsy with the harmony”. All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of the present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it. (2015, pp. 158-159)

Of course, this passage goes far beyond anything Vico would write. He did not affirm the "joy in the dance”. Nor would he think of a god, the product of the poetic imagination, as "Love Itself” or "Good Itself” in the way of the Romantic Theology of Dante or Wordsworth. Discussing the romanticism of Herder, Auerbach makes this point clearly:

He {Herder} would never have conceived the idea that primitive imagination created institutions with more severe and ferocious, boundaries, more narrow and insurmountable than any civilised society can possibly do. But that is Vico’s idea; it is the very essence of his system. The aim of primitive imagination, in his view, is not liberty; but on the contrary, establishment of fixed limits, as a psychological and material protection against the chaos of the surrounding world. And, later on, mythical imagination serves as the base of a political system and as a weapon in the struggle for political and economic power. The ages of the gods and of the heroes, with their all-pervading "poetry”, are not at all poetical in the Romantic sense, although, in both cases, poetry means imagination opposed to reason. (2014, p. 43)

Does this suggest opposing ideas of the imagination? Clearly not, if one places the work of the imagination in its context. The reality surrounding Vico’s early human ‘was’ ferocious and chaotic, so that the task of the imagination was inevitably defensive and protective. It needed a tamer environment for it to open itself to its poetic celebration as joyful and as a source of contemplation. The age of men, with all its invidious comparisons of status, also heralded a new sense of freedom, including a freedom of expression no longer limited by the need for defence, one that could survey a world of experience in all its aspects. Vico was correct; the demand for equity does result in an increasing focus upon individual aspirations.

These aspirations may well result in part from the perceived need for equity, but their development is made possible by the movement towards ‘inwardness’: that capacity to bring the outcomes of experience before the mind as matters for analysis and contemplation. Individuals could now take responsibility for their behaviour and could be judged by the extent to which they did so. The act of sacrifice, for example, moves from an occurrence acted out by the group to a choice that defines the person’s moral identity. We can see how the demand for equity which Vico identified is part of a more general movement of sensitivity towards individual choice within a society that can encompass individual viewpoints within a common sense of purpose.

But can we achieve such a whole in the present time of alienation and the broken society when institutional religion has lost its binding force? Or, more, precisely, can individuals see themselves and each other as parts of the whole, in the way in which religious thought has understood the part, the individual, to be an expression of the whole, and can there be a society whose ideal is to become the embodiment of a whole that is at once ourselves and other than ourselves? Only, I think, by that same self-denial which has typified much of religious thought, East and West, that Marcel (1951) has called ‘availability’. This is true openness to what the world of nature and of persons has to offer without the desire to possess and control - being together, not having. Keats called it a “negative capacity”, one, without the interference of pre-judgment, that allows the world itself to respond to the poetic imagination.

References:
Auerbach, E. (2014). Time, history, and literature. Princeton University Press.
Berlin, I. (2013). Three critics of the enlightenment. Princeton University Press.
Ellul, J. (1967). The technological society. Random House.

Lewis, C. S. (2015). The problem of pain. William Collins.
Marcel, G. (1951). The mystery of being. Two volumes. The Harvill Press.
Schaefer, J. (2019). Giambattista Vico on natural law. Routledge.

Turcke, C. (2013). Philosophy of dreams. Yale University Press.
Verene, D. P. (1964). Philosophy and the return to self-knowledge. Yale University Press. Verene, D. P. (1981). Vico’s science of imagination. Cornell University Press.
Vico, G. (1976). The new science of Giambattista Vico (1744 ed.). (T. G. Bergin & M. H. Fisch, Trans.). Cornell University Press.

Vico's Poetic Imagination & Romantic Soul-Making: The Aesthetic as Cure of the Mind

There is a remarkable range and coherence to Vico’s thought which defies any attempt to place him solely at any one juncture in the history of ideas. On the one hand, his philosophy leads directly to recognisable concerns of modernity: the ideas of the barbarism of reflection and of the persistent primacy of the poetic as a form of the mind stand as an early critique of the Enlightenment, an anticipation of Romanticism, but also a foreshadowing of contemporary concern over the dangers of a collective mind-set which reduces thinking and feeling to the functionalism of technique; we can also acknowledge his thinking as foundational to the present-day in its emphasis upon the symbolic world as originating in the experiencing and activities of early humans attempting to make sense of the tribulations of their existence; and, of course, his concept of the sensus communis as the shared opinions and values that provide stability to the social group is equivalent to our own notions of a social consensus whose applicability may ultimately be tested in courts of law - a task that demands the subtlety and wisdom of rhetoric in the interpretation of what constitutes a “just” case.

On the other hand, however, his emphasis upon the essential significance of religious experience as the means by which we validate the events of the human situation, one of the most significant principles of Renaissance thought, no longer has the hold of certainty over us. In response, Vico would point to the excesses of reflection in its purely objective mode as a direct outcome of the neglect of religion and argue that this barbarism itself would eventually return us to the religious fold.

But, of course, such a reversal of mind through excess, a fresh awakening of the imagination as a form of thinking that could guide the sensus communis, could not occur if the poetic evidenced in the Arts had disappeared from human consciousness or was retained only as Art for Art sake: the poetic divorced from both Reason and Religion. But imagination is not to be downgraded to an early stage of development: it is, as Vico reminded us, a necessary aspect of mind, which we can draw from in our present situation; our task is reflect upon the contribution of aesthetic sensibility to forge a philosophy of life in which the poetic imagination recovers its supporting role for the maintenance of the sensus communis - those modes of feeling and thought that guarantee the sense of purpose in a life that is shared with others in the light of ideas that unify. For Vico these unifying ideas could only be found within religion: religion, self, and society are necessarily intertwined, each aspect exerting its influence upon the other to secure the balance of what lies within us and what lies outside.

And that sense of “outside” yet “inside”, something transcendent yet also imminent, which provides, as it were, the sense of an achievable idea, because it is both part of our nature and the ultimate goal for the journey, remains, arguably, of fundamental importance in the modern poetic, even though not associated with any explicit religious creed. For the aesthetic always suggests ‘a more’ than what is stated: it demands a participation in its meaning in order to explore that which cannot be explicitly formulated but retains its quality of a mystery, one that enlightens when, as Stevens (1953) says in the poem he chose to end his Collected Verse, we “think the world imagined” is “the ultimate good”, for it is the realm of “the intensest rendezvous”, in which “We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole/ a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,/ Within its vital boundary, in the mind/ We say God and the imagination are one...”.

In another context he refers to the power of the poetic as "a cure of the mind”. I think we can readily understand how the language of the aesthetic is essentially therapeutic, inviting us to participate in the language of feeling whose purpose is the interpretation of a situation. In mental illness a person’s situation is dominated by a traumatic experience which does not yield to reason; life has become a problem to be solved that cannot be solved by problem-solving.

The person has lost the guiding idea of a narrative by which a life can be “made”. I have deliberately chosen Vico’s 'made’ here in order to capture its meaning as an act of imagination. Our patient has lost the capacity to imagine a life beyond the trauma. Vico’s first humans could collectively imagine a response that put their trauma into the narrative framework of their interaction with gods and heroes. This effect of this making is to form a meaningful structure in their symbolic universe which in some sense relieves the terror of random and unpredictable events: they have created an “other” to which the self can relate in this act of interpretation - for example, by sacrifice in a sacred place. We witness here the beginning of the distinction between inner and outer worlds; in the course of history that which is sacrificed becomes less and less an obvious token of the outer world and more an expression of an inner, mental orientation, for which no external token is needed. The self then primarily relates itself to the concept or meaning of sacrifice, as, for example, when St Francis takes the vow of poverty: he may now judge himself insofar as his actions within the world are consistent with the valued otherness of the meaning.

On this account we can understand how in symbolic interaction the “making” or “creating” of the subject is complemented by the “giving” of the subject-matter: the scientist receives some confirmation of a hypothesis through the results of an experiment; technology has the value of "something working" as desired; a work of art is completed when, as Paul Klee said, "the work looks back at me". All these different endeavours function within a community of shared concern, the scientific community monitoring methodological validity, the technical, the success of the working model, and the aesthetic, the value of the work in promoting ways in which we can "look back" to our selves within the world to glimpse an essential humanity. But we can see immediately that the aesthetic and, indeed, the ethical, has a relationship to human affairs quite distinct from that of science and technology.

The self of the scientist or technologist is deliberately set aside, "controlled out" as far as possible in the investigation, whose results are judged entirely impersonally according to criteria which can be objectively stated. On the other hand, one’s self must be intimately involved with the aesthetic for it to enrich our lives. The challenge that art presents is one of "soul-making" in Keats’s well-known phrase, the joint development of our inner and outer lives. Art asks of us, not "what is?", but "what should I feel and think?" The aesthetic or ethical subject exists as a challenge for us; if we meet with some success, we are not confronted with a "result", but with something more akin to a gift which, in turn, is not that which can be simply observed: perhaps we could call it a new state of being, present only insofar as our lives are guided by it. Dante remarked that men should aspire to nobility and women to graciousness. We would, I think, not wish to apply these gender affiliations nowadays, but we can still appreciate this coming-together of the nobility of purpose and the granting of grace.

But how can a work of art be experienced as "looking back" to us in such a way that we can say, as Rilke did on contemplating an ancient sculpture of Apollo, "I must change my life"? Only, surely, on the ground that an affinity exists between the two - the act of appreciation and the art object itself - in which like can meet with like. There must be a sense, then, that the art object itself fulfils its purpose through the presentation of a subjectivity within itself to that of the beholder: the co-incidence of the two is an intersubjectivity in which self and world gain a sort of harmony, Wordsworth’s balance of what lies "within" and what lies "without".

We can agree that the work of art "looks back" at you, but it must also have the quality of ‘inviting’ you into its symbolic world in order to appreciate how it can change your life. We can more fully understand this intersubjectivity through the phenomenologist’s concept of intentionality. Edmund Husserl described intentionality as the essential directedness of consciousness towards its object: in this sense, consciousness creates the world of objects in which we live. Merleau-Ponty (1962) in his phenomenology argued that it is the world as lived towards which intentionality direct us; there is, he says, an "intentional arc” between the person and the world which joins us with the world prior to any reflection that we undertake upon it: the natural habitat of consciousness. He shows how, for example, certain injuries to the brain impede the flow of intentionality, so that the patient must resort to a method of constructing reality by linking propositions piece by piece to a conclusion. In such illness, he concludes, the intentional arc "goes limp”. It is this sense of a pre-reflective world of intentionality, of being "at home” in the world, which permits the mutuality of self and other experienced through the aesthetic. The work of art exists, not to represent a reality, but to reveal it as a fulfilled intentionality; the act of appreciation is, therefore, attained through our entering the world of the work, developing and applying our own intentionality to appreciate the artist’s vision.

In this chapter I shall reflect upon Vico’s priority of the poetic imagination through an examination of that great synthesis of poetry and philosophy that began in the latter part of the eighteenth century and is said to have expired by 1840 - the period of Romanticism. The French Revolution was viewed as a signal for a new age of "liberty, equality, and fraternity” and the denial of any authority imposed on human relations and upon the "mind of man”. The authoritarian God was to be superseded by the God within us, becoming an aspect of the self in its inner being through communion with Nature and our fellow humans. The way to this communion was through the development of, and reflection upon, the poetic imagination which establishes the vital presence to one another of mind and nature, of inner and outer life, of subject and object. Poetry and philosophy joined in the celebration of a transforming joy found amidst the sorrows of life. Don’t call the world "a vale of tears”, says Keats (quoted in Trilling (1955)), call the world, if you please, ‘The Vale of Soul-making!’.. .I say ‘Soul making - Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence - There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions - but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each is personally itself.

Abrams (1971) identifies the nature of English and German Romanticism as a "Natural Supernaturalism” and notes the powerful influence of Christian philosophy as a guiding template, even accepted by Shelley and Keats themselves, who were highly critical of Christian theology. This template consists of a linear view of history in which humanity develops towards a final apocalyptic revelation, together with an appeal to the hermeneutic tradition identified by Jacob Boehme, in which the events and personages of the Bible are to be read and understood as aspects of our own experience; Abrams refers to this viewpoint in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a radical splinter group within the Puritan Revolution of Seventeenth Century England which embraced a Christian communism:

Jesus Christ at a distance from thee, will never save thee; but a Christ within is thy Saviour. {For the spirit} which is the light and life of Christ within the heart, discovers all darknesse, and delivers mankind from bondage; ‘And besides him there is no Saviour’. (1971, pp. 113, 214)