The Philosophy of Giambattista VicoCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico
Croce, Benedetto
Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744
with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.
From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples
and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon
a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into
induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught
dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by
Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies
of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited
by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by
modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called
sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin word _olfacere,_
which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico
attaches such importance to this connexion between poetic universals
and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led
to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel
or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have
another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy
to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by
esoteric wisdom and _vice versa,_ both of which are united in the idea
of an everlasting philosophy of man.
Simultaneously with his theory of myth and its relation to philosophy,
Vico expounds his theory of religion, and the relation it bears to
philosophy. Two thoughts on this subject are to be found up and down
the New Science. The first is, that religion arises in the phase of
weakness and savagery from the mind's need to allay its desire to
understand more or less the phenomena of nature and man; for instance,
to explain lightning. The second is, that religion is produced in
the mind by fear of the person who threatens by lightning. We might
describe these two views as theories respectively of the theoretical
and practical origin of religion; and since according to Vico's
doctrine man consists of nothing but intellect and will, clearly
religion can have no other origin than these two. Now, setting aside
religion in its practical aspect, to be discussed later, religion in
its theoretical aspect is surely nothing else than the imaginative
universal, poetic animism, or myth. To it belongs the institution
which Vico calls divination; that is, the methods of collecting and
interpreting the language of Jupiter, the "real words," gestures and
signs of God, formed as imaginative universals and created by the
animating fancy. And as from myth come science and philosophy, so in
like manner from divination comes the knowledge of ground and cause,
philosophic or scientific prediction.
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