Communal Identity vs. Social Rights: Vico, Romanticism, and the Modern Search for Wholeness

We must first distinguish between the social and the communal. The latter is founded by definition upon the shared concerns of participants, an agreement on shared values that constitute the whole and the roles of individuals within that whole. That sharing defines the community since individuals define themselves through identification with the community. There is a personal commitment to this guiding principle. Whilst societies that possess numerous interest groups (rulers and ruled, men and women, etc.) can define themselves only through an appeal to “equal rights" (an appeal variously interpreted) as a guiding principle, engagement within a community is an obligation, not a right. Vico’s philosophy can be seen in this sense as a history of the movement from obligation to rights. The idea of a right stems from the divisiveness of a perceived wrong, from which the obligation to remove it derives.

This movement towards the fairness of equal opportunity marks the transition to modern society in which any built-in hierarchy of persons is open to be questioned. We know that Vico thought that the progression from communal to social identity was inevitable and necessarily disruptive to the point that a whole new cycle of human development would occur that would in some way repeat what may be termed the first cycle - a new mythology, as it were, on which we can build a new sensus communis.

In previous chapters I suggested that Romanticism and modern phenomenology extended Vico’s emphasis upon the aesthetic grounding of the human situation; through identification with the forces beyond us, we come to define the human situation and ourselves. This suggestion, of course, takes us well beyond Vico’s historical account in that it recognises the inward journey that accompanies our evolving presence to the world. That journey is one of a deliberate use of metaphor which aims to develop the range and intensity of our response to the world: the playful range of metaphorical thinking leads to a revived sense of a living whole in which the individual prospers as its reflective, exemplary centre.

This aesthetic ‘situates’ us in the world. In modern societies being situated in the world is neither a simple identification nor a supposition: it is identity recognised as difference, the world in its otherness as the home of our identity, a world we must make in order to retain its presence to us. But the strength of those original identifications, developed not from this sophisticated identification, but from that sense of a direct connection between the beings judged to be other than ourselves - first, the gods, then, nature itself - and ourselves, so that an external reference granting validity to human works was guaranteed. That sense of an assumed affiliation between “the other" and ourselves provided the presence of an enveloping and supportive whole supporting the existence and flourishing of the individual with the community. However, we cannot rely nowadays on such a taken-for-granted affiliation, especially one whose foundation presumed the existence of supernatural gods.

The question, therefore, arises in the modern world: can such a unifying presence be experienced again when the original and religious aesthetic connection of self and world is said to hold no longer? What then of personal identity when the other than oneself that identifies you has lost its force or disappeared entirely?

This was Holderlin’s (2019) question. His sense of the existence of the other way of being was not to be challenged; it existed in the figure of Diotima and her good works. But when Diotima came into contact with what we absurdly call the "real world”, her life disintegrated, so overwhelming was the disparity between the actual and ideal. As we saw in Chapter 7, this disparity was the major theme of Musil’s (1953) novel, The Man Without Qualities and, perhaps, the reason why the novel remained unfinished. For, on the one hand, his central character, Ulrich, the man without qualities, identifies what he calls "The Other Condition” as a distinct and unifying state of consciousness, its very distinctiveness suggests its isolation from the rules of the normal, pragmatic-objective perspective: in fact, he refers to it as "a dreamlike condition” that inevitably contrasts with any established moral code. Musil’s ideal, then, is clearly not one of individuals making rules within society, but one of the individual at odds with the cage of rules imposed by society.

Accordingly, the idea of faith as a way of revolting "against” the established norms imposed upon citizens from above, which often leads to divisiveness and conflict, is exactly right: the novel’s implicit theme is the passage from 1913 to 1914. That passage is the consequence of “a perspectival abridgement of consciousness” due to social divisiveness. Who would deny that our modern world of divisive nationalism and capitalism, autocratic regimes, and the exploitation of nature for profit, is a result of this abridgement? However, if we attend, not to such divisiveness, but to the communal, in which individuals are united in a faith of communal activity, we may discern a natural transition from the wonder of the other condition to the moral life within the community.

The lost egoism of details in the viewing of the country scene is paralleled by a similar loss of separateness in human relationships. In this way, the togetherness of the natural world is suggestive of the human community. There is, of course, a clear distinction between the wonder of early humanity expressed in the naming of Jove as the objective correlate of a feeling and the work of the reflective imagination in which contemplation of the condition of wonder transforms the condition into an idea. Think back to William Blake’s fourfold progression, in which the third level of wonder assumes its universal meaning as a governing idea in the fourth. Blake called that idea Infinity, but in our context, that of an intimate unity of individuals, we may think more along the lines of Plato’s Eros - the Love that leads to Beauty and Truth. But we should think of this idea, not as a given condition, but as a need and an orientation that requires its own fulfilment. The condition of wonder is thereby transformed into a universal idea through the inward journey of contemplation. This revelation of inwardness permits us to identify with an idea that which may guide our life, one of shared meanings within a caring community.