Summary
Philosopher of The New Science and the Autobiography, read in “Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts”, the eighth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, as the thinker who drives words and texts back to their bodily origins and who theorizes a text’s disciplined permanence in culture (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.100-109).
Details
- As a boy of seven he fell head first from the top of a ladder; the doctor’s prognosis was that he would either die or become an idiot, and he acquired a melancholy and irritable temperament (PDF p.100).
- Education, for Vico, enhances the young temperament’s best qualities while reducing them to duty, “di ridurre in ufizio” (The New Science 338, PDF p.100); meaning comes when words “are carried from bodies and from the properties of bodies” (237, PDF p.101).
- His giants symbolize poetic, heroic man; his etymology is “retro-signification”, driving meanings back to the bodies from which they came (PDF p.101).
- Fables were in origin true and severe narrations, vera narratio, received by Homer in corrupt and distorted form (814, PDF p.102).
- Verum and factum are genuinely interchangeable for Vico; a theory’s importance is how much it can assimilate and produce, not what it can explain (PDF p.104).
- Intelligence, intelligere, fathers from something sensed something that does not fall under the senses (363, PDF p.105); Jove, the first feat of mythical divination, arises as nuo, a sign, becomes numen, the divine will (397, PDF p.106).
- The discipline of a text is how its original immediacy is translated into permanence and transmitted in and by culture (PDF p.107).
- In essay 13, Vico counterposes the sacred, accessible only through revelation, with the gentile realm, from gens, informed by ingegno and accessible to his new science, as a basis for Secular interpretation (PDF p.140-141); Benedetto Croce was his greatest modern student (PDF p.139).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Secular interpretation, Worldliness