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Giambattista Vico: The perilous gateway of the point
Abstract
Vico's teaching offers the ability to think, perceive, and understand differently than we have done before; it leads to a new form of Self-knowledge. Ironically, in coming to terms with this new awareness we must learn to think imaginatively as did the early ancestors of humanity. As Vico's metaphysics assumes a basis in imagination, and its products (poetry) are literally real, then examining those artifacts can provide an excellent viewpoint with which to try to understand our collective human past as it is manifested through literary works. Vico is asking, in effect, if we civilized humans think in terms that utilize the formation of concepts in relation to intelligible genera, then what form of thinking was used by humans who came before? Bringing together Vico's ideas that early humanity “felt and imagined…without power of ratiocination” and the focus upon the poetic character of their utterances, we find the need to examine imagination as the basis of thought. Accepting the reorientation toward imagination and poetic utterance as primary, we may move toward a new understanding of the function of metaphor; only now, metaphor is seen as primary to and more important than literal or prosaic language. Vico is proposing a new way of making intelligible, of reverting to a type of speech that occurs naturally during the early stages of primitive humanity. Within the development of consciousness lies the discrepancy between two basic forms of thought, from which discrepancy proceeds the development of rationality. The poles are marked by the barbarism of sense and the barbarism of reflection. If these two poles represent the ends of a spectrum, what we really have is a continuum, which implies there is an ontological connection between the barbarism of sense and the barbarism of reflection. This is Vico's true call to heroism, to recreate the first barbarism of sense within our own minds, to use his notion of metaphysical points as indicators of how humans make knowledge, to achieve wisdom of the whole.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|Romance literature|Slavic literature|British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Watson, Randall Lee, "Giambattista Vico: The perilous gateway of the point" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9929242.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9929242