Summary
In “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”, the thirteenth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, secular interpretation is the work of the secular intellectual, drawn from Vico and Gramsci: to show the absence of divine originality and, on the other side, the complex presence of historical actuality — “The conversion of the absence of religion into the presence of actuality is secular interpretation.” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.141).
Details
- Gramsci’s secular, as against religious, intellectuals are less familiar than his division between organic and traditional intellectuals; in a letter of August 17, 1931 he held the Crocean premise that modern man can and should live without the help of religion to be “a civil conquest that must not be lost” (quoted PDF p.139).
- Social and intellectual authority for secular intellectuals does not derive directly from the divine but from an analyzable history made by human beings (PDF p.140).
- Vico counterposes the sacred — created by God, accessible only through revelation, ahistorical because complete — with the gentile realm, derived from gens, whose web of filiations and affiliations is informed by ingegno, human ingenuity and spirit, and is accessible to the new science (PDF p.140).
- The interpreter of that secular, horizontal expanse divines what cannot be seen by putting himself in the position of the maker; in no instance can it be allowed that something other than human agency caused history (PDF p.141).
- No single explanation sending one back immediately to a single origin is adequate; a heterogeneity of human involvement is equivalent to a heterogeneity of results and of interpretive skills and techniques; there is no center and no inertly given authority, even though authority, order and distinction exist (PDF p.141).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, Worldliness