V

GIAMBATTISTA VICO

The real revolutionary who by putting aside the concept of probability and conceiving imagination in a novel manner actually discovered the true nature of poetry and art and, so to speak, invented the science of Æsthetic, was the Italian Giambattista Vico.

Ten years prior to the publication in Germany of Baumgarten's first treatise, there had appeared in Naples (1725) the first Scienza nuova, which developed ideas on the nature of poetry outlined in a former work (1721), De constantia iurisprudentis, outcome of "twenty-five years' continuous and harsh meditation."[1] In 1730 Vico republished it with fresh developments which gave rise to two special books (Della sapienza poetica and Della discoperta del vero Omero) in the second Scienza Nuova. Nor did he ever tire of repeating his views and forcing them upon the attention of his hostile contemporaries at every opportunity, seizing such occasion even in prefaces and letters, poems on the occasion of weddings or funerals, and in such press notices as fell to his duty as public censor of literature.

And what were these ideas? Neither more nor less, we may say, than the solution of the problem stated by Plato, attacked but not solved by Aristotle, and again vainly attacked during the Renaissance and afterwards: is poetry rational or irrational, spiritual or brutal? and, if spiritual, what is its special nature and what distinguishes it from history and science?

As we know, Plato confined it within the baser part of the soul, the animal spirits. Vico re-elevates it and makes of it a period in the history of humanity: and since history for him means an ideal history whose periods consist not of contingent facts but of forms of the spirit, he makes it a moment in the ideal history of the spirit, a form of consciousness. Poetry precedes intellect, but follows sense; through confusing it with the latter, Plato failed to grasp the position it should really occupy and banished it from his Republic. "Men at first feel without being aware; next they become aware with a perturbed and agitated soul; finally they reflect with an undisturbed mind. This Aphorism is the Principle of poetical sentences which are formed by the sense of passions and affections; differing thereby from philosophical sentences which are formed by reflexion through ratiocination; whence the latter approach more nearly to truth the more they rise towards the universal, while the former have more of certainty the more they approach the individual."[2] An imaginative phase of consciousness, but one possessed of positive value.

The imaginative phase is altogether independent and autonomous with respect to the intellectual, which is not only incapable of endowing it with any fresh perfection but can only destroy it. "The studies of Metaphysics and Poetry are in natural opposition one to the other; for the former purges the mind of childish prejudice and the latter immerses and drowns it in the same: the former offers resistance to the judgement of the senses, while the latter makes this its chief rule: the former debilitates, the latter strengthens, imagination: the former prides itself in not turning spirit into body, the latter does its utmost to give a body to spirit: hence the thoughts of the former must necessarily be abstract, while the concepts of the latter show best when most clothed with matter: to sum up, the former strives that the learned may know the truth of things stripped of all passion: the latter that the vulgar may act truly by means of intense excitement of the senses, without which stimulant they assuredly would not act at all. Hence from all time, in all languages known to man, never has there been a strong man equally great as metaphysician and poet: such a poet as Homer, father and prince of poetry."[3] Poets are the senses, philosophers the intellect, of mankind.[4] Imagination is "stronger in proportion as reason is weaker."[5]

No doubt "reflexion" may be put in verse; but it does not become poetry thereby. "Abstract sentences belong to philosophers, since they contain universals; and reflexions concerning such passions are made by poets who are false and frigid."[6] Those poets "who sing of the beauty and virtue of ladies by reflexion ... are philosophers arguing in verses or in love-rhymes."[7] One set of ideas belongs to philosophers, another to poets: these latter are identical with those of painters, from which "they differ only in colours and words."[8] Great poets are born not in epochs of reflexion but in those of imagination, generally called barbarous: Homer, in the barbarism of antiquity: Dante in that of the Middle Ages, the "second barbarism of Italy."[9] Those who have chosen to read philosophic reason into the verse of the great father of Greek poetry have transferred the character of a later age into an earlier, since the era of poets precedes that of philosophers and countries in infancy were sublime poets. Poetic locutions arose before prose, "by the necessity of nature" not "by caprice of pleasure"; fables or imaginative universals were conceived before reasoned, i.e. philosophical universals.[10]

With these observations Vico justified and at the same time corrected the opinion of Plato in the Republic, denying to Homer wisdom, every kind of wisdom; the legislative of Lycurgus and Solon, the philosophic of Thales, Anacharsis and Pythagoras, the strategic of military commanders.[11] To Homer (he says) belongs wisdom, undoubtedly, but poetic wisdom only: the Homeric images and comparisons derived from wild beasts and the elements of savage nature are incomparable; but "such success does not spring from talent imbued with domesticity and civilized with any philosophy."[12]

When anybody takes to writing poetry in an era of reflexion, it is because he is returning to childhood and "putting his mind in fetters"; no longer reflecting with his intellect, he follows imagination and loses himself in the particular. If a true poet dallies with philosophical ideas, it is not "that he may assimilate them and dismiss imagination," but merely "that he may have them in front of him, to examine as though on a stage or public platform."[13] The New Comedy which made its appearance after Socrates is undeniably impregnated with philosophic ideas, with intellectual universals, with "intelligible kinds of human conduct"; but its authors were poets in so far only as they knew how to transform logic into imagination and their ideas into portraits.[14]

The dividing line between art and science, imagination and intellect, is here very strongly drawn: the two distinct activities are repeatedly contrasted with a sharpness that leaves no room for confusion. The line of demarcation between poetry and history is hardly less firm. While not quoting Aristotle's passage, Vico implicitly shows why poetry seemed to Aristotle more philosophical than history, and at the same time he dispels the erroneous opinion that history concerns the particular and poetry the universal. Poetry joins hands with science not because it consists in the contemplation of concepts but because, like science, it is ideal. The most beautiful poetic story must be "wholly ideal": "by means of idea, the poet breathes reality into things otherwise unreal; masters of poetry claim that their art must be wholly compact of imagination, like a painter of the ideal, not imitative like a portrait-painter: whence, from their likeness to God the Creator, poets and painters alike are called divine."[15] And against those who blame poets for telling stories which, they say, are untrue, Vico protests: "The best stories are those approximating most nearly to ideal truth, the eternal truth of God: it is immeasurably more certain than the truth of historians who often bring into play caprice, necessity or fortune; but such a Captain as, for instance, Tasso's Godfrey is the type of a captain of all times, of all nations, and so are all personages of poetry, whatever difference there may be in sex, age, temperament, custom, nation, republic, grade, condition or fortune; they are nothing save the eternal properties of the human soul, rationally discussed by politicians, economists and moral philosophers, and painted as portraits by the poet."[16] Referring to an observation made by Castelvetro, and approving it in part, to the effect that if poetry is a presentiment of the possible it should be preceded by history, imitation of the real, yet finding himself confronted by the difficulty that, nevertheless, poets invariably precede historians, Vico solves the problem by identifying history with poetry: primitive history was poetry, its plot was narration of fact, and Homer was the first historian; or rather "he was a heroic character amongst Greek men, in so far as they poetically narrated their own history."[17] Poetry and history, therefore, are originally identical; or rather, undifferentiated. "But inasmuch as it is not possible to give false ideas, since falsity arises from an embroiled combination of ideas, so is it impossible to give a tradition, however fabulous, that has not had, at the beginning, a basis of truth."[18] Hence we gain an entirely new insight into mythology: it is no longer an arbitrary calculated invention, but a spontaneous vision of truth as it presented itself to the spirit of primitive man. Poetry gives an imaginative vision; science or philosophy intelligible truth; history the consciousness of certitude.

Language and poetry are, in Vico's estimation, substantially the same. In refuting the "vulgar error of grammarians" who maintain the priority of the birth of prose over that of verse, he finds "within the origin of Poetry, so far as it has been herein discovered," the "origin of languages and the origin of letters."[19] This discovery was made by Vico after "toil as disagreeable and overwhelming as we should undergo had we to strip off our own nature and enter into that of the primæval men of Hobbes, Grotius, or Puffendorf; creatures possessing no language at all, by whom were created the languages of the ancient world."[20] But his painful labour was richly repaid by his refutation of the erroneous theory that languages sprang from convention or, as he said, "signified at will," whereas it is evident that "from their natural origin words must have had natural meanings; this is plainly seen in common Latin ... wherein almost all words have arisen by natural necessity, either from natural properties or from their sensible effects; and in general, metaphor forms the bulk of language in the case of every people."[21] This argument strikes a blow at another common error of the grammarians, "that the language of prose writers is correct, that of poets incorrect."[22] The poetic tropes grouped under the heading of metonymy seem to Vico to be "born of the nature of primitive peoples, not of capricious selection by men skilled in poetic art";[23] stories told "by means of similitudes, imagery and comparisons," result "from lack of the genera and species required to define things with propriety," and "are therefore, by reason of natural necessities, common to entire peoples."[24] The earliest languages must have consisted of "dumb gestures and objects which had natural connexions with the ideas to be expressed."[25] He observes very acutely that to these figurate languages belong not only hieroglyphics but the emblems, knightly bearings, devices and blazons which he calls "mediæval hieroglyphics."[26] In the barbarous Middle Ages "Italy was forced to fall back on the mute language ... of the earliest gentile nations in which men, before discovering articulate speech, were obliged like mutes to use actions or objects having natural connexions with the ideas, which at that time must have been exceedingly sensuous, of the things which they wished to signify; such expressions, clad in almost vocal words, must have had all the lively expressiveness of poetic diction." [27] Hence arise three kinds or phases of language: dumb show, the language of the gods; heraldic language, or that of the heroes; and spoken language. Vico also looked forward to a universal system of etymology, a "dictionary of mental words common to all nations."

A man with ideas of this sort about imagination, language and poetry could not say he was satisfied with formalistic and verbal Logic, whether Aristotelian or scholastic. The human mind (says Vico) "makes use of intellect when from things which it feels by sense it gathers something that does not fall under sense: this is the true meaning of the Latin intelligere."[28] In a rapid outline of the history of Logic, Vico wrote: "Aristotle came and taught the syllogism, a method more suited to expound universals in their particulars than to unite particulars by the discovery of universals: then came Zeno with his sorites, which corresponds with modern philosophic methods and refines, without sharpening, the wits; and no advantage whatever was reaped from either by mankind at large. With great reason, therefore, does Verulam, equally eminent as politician and philosopher, propound, commend and illustrate induction in his Organum: he is followed by the English with excellent results to experimental philosophy."[29] From this source is derived his criticism of mathematics, which have always, but especially in his day, been considered as the type of perfect science.

In all this, Vico is not only a thorough revolutionary, but is quite conscious of being so: he knows himself to be in opposition to all previous theories on the subject. He says that his new principles of poetry "are wholly opposed to, and not merely different from, all which have been imagined from the time of Plato and his disciple Aristotle to Patrizzi, Scaliger and Castelvetro among the moderns; poetry is now discovered to have been the first language used by all nations alike, even the Hebrew."[30] In another passage he says that by his theories "is overthrown all that has ever been said of the origin of poetry, beginning from Plato and Aristotle, right down to our own Patrizzi, Scaliger and Castelvetro; and it is found that poetry arising through defect of human ratiocination is as sublime as any which owes its being to the later rise of philosophy and the arts of composition and criticism; indeed, that these later sources never gave rise to any poetry that could equal, far less surpass it."[31] In the Autobiography he boasts of having discovered "other principles of poetry than those found by Greeks and Latins and all others from those times down to the present day; on these are founded other views on mythology."[32]

These ancient principles of poetry "laid down first by Plato and confirmed by Aristotle" had been the anticipation or prejudice which had misled all writers on poetic reason (among whom he cites Jacopo Mazzoni). Statements "even of most serious philosophers such as Patrizzi and others" upon the origin of song and verse are so inept that he "blushes even to mention them."[33] It is curious to see him annotating the Ars Poetica of Horace, with a view to finding some plausible sense in it by applying the principles of the Scienza nuova.[34]

It is probable that he was familiar with the writings of Muratori among contemporaries, for he quotes him by name, and of Gravina, who was a personal acquaintance; but if he read the Perfetta Poesia and the Forza della fantasia he could not have been satisfied by the treatment meted out to the faculty of imagination, so highly valued and respected by himself; and if Gravina influenced him at all it must have been by provoking him to contradiction. In this latter (if not directly in such French writers as Le Bossu) he may have met with the fallacy of regarding Homer as a repository of wisdom, a fallacy which he combated with vigour and pertinacity. In his estimation, among the gravest faults of the Cartesians was their inability to appreciate the world of imagination and poetry. Of his own times he complained they were "benumbed by analytical methods and by a philosophy which sought to deaden every faculty of soul which reached it through the body, especially that of imagination, now held to be mother of all human error": times "of a wisdom which freezes the generous soul of the best poetry," and prevents all understanding of it.[35]

It is just the same with the theory of language. "The manner of birth and the nature of languages has been the cause of much painful toil and meditation: nor, from the Cratylus of Plato, in which in our other works we have falsely delighted and believed" (he alludes to the doctrine followed by him in his own first book, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia), "down to Wolfgang Latius, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, Francisco Sanchez and others, can we find anything to satisfy our understanding; so much that in discussing matters of this kind Signor Giovanni Clerico says there is nothing in philology involved in such a maze of doubt and difficulty."[36] The chief grammarian-philosophers do not escape criticism. Grammar, says he, lays down rules for speaking correctly: Logic for speaking truly; "and since in the order of nature we must speak truly before learning to speak correctly, Giulio Cesare della Scala, followed by the best grammarians, employs all his magnificent energy to reason to the causes of the Latin language from the principles of logic. But his great design ended in failure for this reason, that he attached himself to the logical principles of a single philosopher, namely Aristotle, whose principles are too universal to explain the almost infinite particulars which naturally beset him who would reason concerning a language. Whence it happened that Francisco Sanchez, who followed him with admirable zeal, attempting in his Minerva to explain the innumerable particles which are found in Latin by his famous principle of ellipsis, and trying thereby, though without success, to vindicate the logical principles of Aristotle, fell into the most cumbrous clumsinesses among an almost innumerable host of Latin phrases whereby he meant to make good the slight and subtle omissions employed by Latin in expressing its meaning."[37] The origin of parts of speech and syntax is wholly different from that assigned to them by folk who fancied that "the people who invented language must first have gone to school to Aristotle."[38] The same criticism undoubtedly must have extended to the logico-grammarians of Port-Royal, for Vico remarked that the Logic of Arnauld was built "on the same plan as that of Aristotle."[39]

It may well be granted that Vico was more in sympathy with the seventeenth-century rhetoricians, in whom we have detected a premonition of æsthetic science. For Vico, as for them, wit (referring to imagination and memory) was "the father of all invention": judgement concerning poetry was for him a "judgement of the senses," a phrase equivalent to "taste" or "good taste," expressions never used by him in this connexion. There is no doubt he was familiar with the writers of treatises on wit and conceits, for, in a dry rhetorical manual written for the use of his school (in which one looks in vain for a shadow of his own personal ideas), he quotes Paolo Beni, Pellegrini, Pallavicino and the Marquis Orsi.[40] He highly esteems Pallavicini's treatise on Style and has knowledge of the book Del bene by the same author;[41] perhaps too his mind was not unaffected by the flash of genius which had enabled the Jesuit for one instant to perceive that poetry consists of "first apprehensions." He does not name Tesauro, but there is no doubt he knew him; indeed the Scienza nuova includes a section, besides that on poetry, upon "blazons," "knightly bearings," "military banners," "medals," and so forth, precisely similar in method to that of Tesauro when he treats of" figurate conceits" in his Cannochiale aristotelico.[42] For Tesauro such conceits are merely metaphorical ingenuities, like any other; for Vico they are wholly the work of imagination, for imagination expresses itself not in words only, but in the "mute language" of lines and colours. He knew something also of Leibniz; the great German and Newton were by him described as" the greatest wits of the time"[43]; but he seems to have remained in complete ignorance of the æsthetic attempts of the Leibnitian school in Germany. His "Logic of poetry" was a discovery independent of, and earlier than, Bülffinger's Organon of the inferior faculties, the Gnoseologia inferior of Baumgarten, and the Logik der Einbildungskraft of Breitinger. In truth, Vico belongs on one side to the vast Renaissance reaction against formalism and scholastic verbalism, which, beginning with the reaffirmation of experience and sensation (Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Bacon), was bound to go on by reasserting the function of imagination in individual and social life: on the other side he is a precursor of Romanticism.

The importance of Vico's new poetic theory in his thought as a whole as well as in the organism of his Scienza nuova has never been fully appreciated, and the Neapolitan philosopher is still commonly regarded as the inventor of the Philosophy of History. If by such a science is meant the attempt to deduce concrete history by ratiocination and to treat epochs and events as if they were concepts, the only result of Vico's efforts to solve the problem could have been failure; and the same is true of his many successors. The fact is that his philosophy of history, his ideal history, his Scienza nuova d' intorno alia comune natura delle nazioni, does not concern the concrete empirical history which unfolds itself in time: it is not history, it is a science of the ideal, a Philosophy of the Spirit. That Vico made many discoveries in history proper which have been to a great extent confirmed by modern criticism (e.g. on the development of the Greek epic and the nature and genesis of feudal society in antiquity and in the Middle Ages) certainly deserves all emphasis; but this side of his work must be kept distinctly apart from the other, strictly philosophical, side. And if the philosophical part is a doctrine expounding the ideal moments of the spirit, or in his own words "the modifications of our human mind," of these moments or modifications Vico undertakes especially to define and fully describe not the logical, ethical and economic moments (though on these too he throws much fight), but precisely the imaginative or poetic. The larger portion of the second Scienza nuova hinges on the discovery of the creative imagination, including the "new principles of Poetry," the observations on the nature of language, mythology, writing, symbolic figures and so forth. All his "system of civilization, of the Republic, of laws, of poetry, of history, in a word, of humanity at large" is founded upon this discovery, which constitutes the novel point of view at which Vico places himself. The author himself observes that his second book, dedicated to Poetic Wisdom, "wherein is made a discovery totally opposed to Verulam's," forms "nearly the whole body of the work"; but the first and third books also deal almost exclusively with works of the imagination. It might be maintained, therefore, that Vico's "New Science" was really just Æsthetic; or at least the Philosophy of the Spirit with special emphasis upon the Philosophy of the Æsthetic Spirit.

Among so many luminous points, or rather in such a general blaze of light, there are yet dark nooks in his mind; corners that remain in shadow. By not maintaining a rigid distinction between concrete history and the philosophy of the spirit, Vico allowed himself to suggest historical periods which do not correspond with the real periods, but are rather allegories, the mythological expression of his philosophy of the spirit. From the same source arises the multiplicity of those periods (usually three in number) which Vico finds in the history of civilization in general, in poetry and language and practically every subject. "The first peoples, who were the children of the human race, founded first the world of the arts: next, after a long interval, the philosophers, who were therefore the aged among nations, founded the world of the sciences: with which humanity attained completion."[44] Historically, understood in an approximate sense, this scheme of evolution has some truth; but only an approximate truth. In consequence of the same confusion of history and philosophy he denied primitive peoples any kind of intellectual logic, and conceived not only their physics, cosmology, astronomy and geography as poetic in character, but their morals, their economy and their politics as well. But not only has there never been a period in concrete human history entirely poetic and ignorant of all abstraction or power of reasoning, but such a state cannot even be conceived. Morals, politics, physics, all presuppose intellectual work, however imperfect they may be. The ideal priority of poetry cannot be materialized into a historical period of civilization.

Linked with this error is another into which Vico often falls when he asserts that "the chief aim of poetry" is to "teach the ignorant vulgar to act virtuously" and to "invent fables adapted with the popular understanding capable of producing strong emotion."[45] Having regard to the clear explanations he himself gave of the inessentiality of abstractions and intellectual artifice in poetry; when we remember that for him poetry makes her own rules for herself without consulting anybody, and that he clearly established the peculiar theoretical nature of the imagination, such a proposition cannot be taken as a return to the pedagogic and heteronomous theory of poetry which in substance he had left far behind: therefore, without doubt, it follows from his historical hypothesis of a wholly poetical epoch of civilization, in which education, science and morality were administered by poets. Another consequence is that "imaginative universals" are apparently sometimes understood by him as imperfect universals (empirical or representative concepts as they were subsequently called); although, on the other hand, individualization is so marked in them and their unphilosophical nature so accentuated that their interpretation as purely imaginative forms may be taken as normal. In conclusion, we remark that fundamental terms are not always used by Vico in the same sense: it is not always clear how far "sensation," "memory," "imagination," "wit" are synonymous or different. Sometimes "sensation" seems outside the spirit, at others one of its chief moments; poets are sometimes the organ of "imagination," sometimes the "sensation" of humanity; and imagination is described as "dilated memory." These are the aberrations of a thought so virgin and original that it was not easy to regulate.