On Giambattista Vico’s ‘The New Science’ : Part Two — The Skysign of Soft Advertisement!
‘What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons catapelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod’s brood, be me fear! Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll. What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their’s hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers? The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
Reading and re-reading the Wake is very much a journey of discovery that is on-going, with the discovery of new territory, its radical and continual wildness that demands a return to it every time with the mindset of an explorer in a strange land in need tools to defend yourself, shelter to keep warm and dry as possible, a map and compass to know where you are going, it is all too easy to get lost. Somewhat like reading Giambattista Vico, (1668–1744), another original mind ever present in the Wake and for whom also reading and writing were not separate indeed he specifically informs us that writing the ‘New Science’ was merely half of his project while the reader reading was the other half albeit this does not imply that he was waiting for the perfect reader to put in his or her appearance rather he meant that we are to do our best and even if we do not grasp an idea we should think of the idea as an idea that is being grasped by the reader not that the idea is encrypted by a writer making himself wilfully obscure. Read it, think it, and even if the reader does not get it right the first time or the second time or the hundredth time the reader in effect becomes the new science.
One thing that soon becomes very noticeable when endeavouring to read Vico is that he repeats himself seemingly endlessly but one way to look at that is to imagine looking at an ordinary hand held object that can be turned over and and all the sides checked out and there comes a point when you soon get an idea of the whole thing. On the other hand if you are holding a large precious jewel and you turn it over once, twice, and many more times, every turn shows you the same face but in a different light. In Vico’s text we are presented with an idea, then there is an idea plus something else, then there is an idea plus more something else’s, and with each addition of information there is a change in what we take the idea to be really about. It is not enough just to see it in one context, adding layers to an idea is like getting a perspective from a high point akin to reaching the summit of a mountain.
It is standard for each paragraph in the ‘New Science’ to be numbered so that references to different translations are not dependent upon page numbers changing with every new addition. The work is divided into sections that make it come across somewhat like a logical treatise with elements, principles, method but then Vico sounds a note the chime of which will reverberate throughout the rest of the text, the chime of the poetic, albeit this is not poetry as normally understood or thought about, it is Vico’s designation for the manner by which humans thought when they first became truly human. So what does he mean by poetic? Not that the first humans were subjective or fanciful but rather that they valued logic, truth, observation and corroboration of evidence just as much as we do. They were very much practical minded people but the sort of logic they employed differed from ours for ours is a conceptual or hierarchical kind of knowledge whereby we are prone to grouping things into phyla, classes types and soon. The first logic was not hierarchical, rather it was sequential, a conditional or if ….. then type of thinking, but sequential or not mythic time was not the same as our time for ours goes along a line and when that line is apparently violated as with lapses of memory or deja vu we know that something is amiss. Metaphoric time ran in two directions at once, forward to the future that needed to be predicted with careful procedures called divination, (the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means, rituals and so on), the other direction was a motion to connect it back to a point in the past, not merely to remember it or describe it in sentimental fashion but to relive it. For mythic thought bi-directional time was the norm, with metaphoric time consciousness the future becomes a great and significant issue as well as the norm.
‘Time’s pace is threefold’
by Friedrich von Schiller, (1759–1805)
The future approaches with hesitation,
The present flies off as fast as an arrow and
The past remains silent forever.
No impatience gives wings
To its steps when time drags,
No fear, no doubt holds back
Its course when it speeds up,
No regret, no magic spell
Can move it when it has stopped.
If you want to be happy and wise when you
End the journey of your life
Take the hesitant as your counsellor,
Not as a tool for your actions.
Don’t choose what is flying past as a friend
Or what remains as your foe.
‘Spruch des Confucius’
Dreyfach ist der Schritt der Zeit,
Zögernd kommt die Zukunft hergezogen,
Pfeilschnell ist das Jetzt entflogen,
Ewig still steht die Vergangenheit.
Keine Ungeduld beflügelt
Ihren Schritt, wenn sie verweilt.
Keine Furcht, kein Zweifeln zügelt
Ihren Lauf, wenn sie enteilt.
Keine Reu, kein Zaubersegen
Kann die stehende bewegen.
Möchtest du beglückt und weise
Endigen des Lebens Reise,
Nimm die Zögernde zum Rath,
Nicht zum Werkzeug deiner That.
Wähle nicht die Fliehende zum Freund,
Nicht die Bleibende zum Feind.
Some terminological points to clear up before I continue. The contronymic/palindromic method of studying Vico is the same method metaphor uses to equalize signifiers and signified, making meaningfulness out of isolated meaning. Words that mean the opposite things are called contronyms, apology for instance, a statement of contrition for an action, or a defense of one. A metaphor has an inversion function as it reverses inside/out viewer/viewed, object/subject, a property that is developed extensively in art and architecture but is also a literary device. And mythos, a traditional or recurrent narrative theme or plot structure, a myth is not so much a fictional false story as the idea that reality is essentially a narrative, a set of dynamic relations that must be played out within a two-fold time of expectation and fate. And placement, a movement from one place to another, and restrictions and prohibitions against movement. And syntagms and paradigms, these explain with how signs relate to each other, syntagmatic relationships are about positioning, paradigmatic relationships are about substitution. A syntagmatic relationship involves a sequence of signs that together create meaning, a paradigmatic relationship involves signs that can replace each other, usually changing the meaning with the substitution, so the words in a sentence are all syntagms and together they form a syntagmatic relationship that creates meaning and were you to alter the order of syntagms in a sentence it can change the meaning significantly. The dionaea muscipula devoured the arachnid, the arachnid devoured the dionaea muscipula, two sentences using the exact same words, syntagms, but with very different meanings because the order, the syntagmatic relationship, of the words has altered.
Imagine an arrow going from left to right and another arrow arching from right to left, the point in the future is an unknown, a Ψ, and the point in the past is also an unknown but it is unknown because it cannot ever be exhausted by words or pictured as an ordinary event. think about the jewel, the point in the past is like the jewel, the meaningfulness of which cannot be encapsulated by meanings. Indeed it obstructs meaning from establishing itself with the use of ordinary signification. Sigmund Freud, (1856–1939), also discovered this jewel point where every endeavour to describe it produced a word and a word that was also an opposite. Sometimes the word was the same word and this is a contranym, for instance the Latin sacer meaning something that is both respected and reviled, homo sacer, or altius meaning both high and low, or hostes meaning hospitality and hostility. Contemporary thought has simplified such as these to discard the contrary meanings but ancient thought, poetic thought, treated such terms as jewels.
The early humans used poetry that was functioning like a science together with the idea of time that moves in two directions at once, and the idea that the negation that we use to distinguish things from their opposites was absent. Once must appreciate Vico’s use of the term myth which can be misleading, for we regard myth as outlandish stories where characters have supernatural powers which is not so far removed from the fact of the matter if we incorporate the notion that a myth was a song for the purpose of putting things into place and keeping them in place. For the metaphoric mind of the first humans everything was mythic in the sense that there was a narrative context of every living thing and every natural object. The story concerned these things and where they came from, and like any good story much was left to the imagination. These stories were sung in ceremonies as the first humans practiced their divination, to celebrate marriages, to bury the dead, they were sung to prevent the dead from haunting the living but also to get their blessing in the form of goods and services. Magic spells too but that applied more to the private use of songs whereby something is muttered under the breath perhaps to get someone to fall in love with you or if they are an unwanted stalker to get them to drop dead. And cities could be sung into order but also cursed into destruction, such was the Biblical story of the defeat of Jericho, for singing and walls go together. A pomerium was the space required between a double wall so that the priest could restore the wall’s protective capabilities. For Vico space as well as time was important for the metaphoric mind of the first humans, they were not at once born from ape ancestors, they were human in form and they used communications of all kinds albeit these were animal kinds of communication and they could indeed be very sophisticated. The significant point is that these communication systems were not yet metaphoric.
Which is to say, they lacked the double structure of time or the capability to combine opposites, they had no magical value, there were no stories because there was was no way to represent thoughts or motives, which is not to suggest that there were no communication systems before metaphor, rather, the first truly human language was metaphoric and that humans became humans because thy communicated poetically and metaphorically. This in all likelihood made them inferior to animals in that once it was recognised then signification took a different turn. There was no longer a confident one to one relation between things and names for things were made strange and not clearer through the first human’s poetic mentality and it is this that made divination absolutely necessary. The objects ands features of nature were no longer obvious or evident, nature was always hiding behind something and its secrets which did not exist prior to metaphor coming onto the scene and it had to be tricked out through methods of divination. Spatial questions thereby present themselves. Where did all this happen? According to Vico the pre-humans were wandering through the primeval forest which offered no view of the sky. They were ready for metaphor so to speak because they were already using sign systems that were sophisticated and extensive, but they did not have the concept of hiding, they did not see that there were any secrets to nature but merely raw materials for them to consume by turning things into signifiers, and this primal forest was literally a place where you could run but you could not hide for the capability of hiding was missing and hence language was bereft of its essential ingredient.
The mechanics of metaphor must be understood, metaphor is not just a placing of something or of an analogy to compare something familiar for something strange, it is a genuinely transformative mental act and we can model what this means through an abstraction of the notion of the sensorium, the sequence of our perceptual experiences as a series of encounters that follow each other in a temporal line. The sequence is suddenly interrupted by something qualitatively huge and there is no time to ponder upon what is happening and sensation overwhelms and surprises us. Maybe Vico was the first person to think how this could be a cause for metaphoric thinking in general even for pre-human minds with no metaphoric sensibility for the only thing one could say about a sequence of suddenly loud and incredibly close encounters is that they have a duration, a beginning and an end. Such frame markers are the only data available and there are no clues as to from whence they come or what they mean. There is merely the frame, and to introduce another technical term, here with reference to the frame, is metalepsis, a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context, a metalespsis of the signifying chain to indicate how within our temporal sensorium something can happen, much like a morse code can tap out a signification that is meaningful but without any specific meanings. What does this mean? At this point we can only say that there is a something, a Ψ and we do not know what Ψ is but it exists as what the loud sequence has tried to signify. And to to turn this into a metaphor we have to consider in language how each new word is selected from a list of possible substitutions, many of them are conventional and expected but here we are dealing with something that when it came its turn in syntagm to fill in the blank provided there was an unexpected surprise that did not make sense of what had come prior.
Such an interruption was quantitative and not qualitative because it was not about meaning in any conventional sense but its place in the syntagmatic chain meant that it was still meaningful, it cancelled out meaning but not meaningfulness and this is how metaphor points to something and is unable to say just what it is talking about, and this renders metaphor portable, something seems to have been concealed from us and as a consequence we can extend the metaphor to almost anything with the same structure, the metaphor retains its unknownness, it points to an empty space, a world that can be extended indefinitely or transported anywhere. The suddenness of the eruption signals an emergency that makes the frame into the cause, rather than the determinate meanings we look at patterns, rhythms motifs, the metaphor shifts the gears of communication from designation of meaning to multiple potentialities of meaning. And Vico invented his own metaphor to describe what happened to the pre-humans wandering in the primeval forest. This was the story about thunder. In one group then another and then another loud thunder terrified the pre-humans, and at some point the the thunder was so loud that they conceived that the thunder was actually a word, a very long and complex word, one that concealed within it a kind of cipher holding a secret and if only they could decode this word it would tell them all about the secret and because words only come from speakers the sky must be a subject like themselves only larger and more powerful.
Joyce took hold of Vico’s notion of the thunder and produced in the Wake multiple versions of a 100 letter word that included, according to some scholars, all of the roots of Indo-European languages. Whether or not this is true, and I haven’t checked, it captures the idea that the thunder even now sounds like a word that we are not meant to understand and it is this withholding of meaning that converts a sign system into a true language. Thunder intensified the anxiety that the first humans had already felt towards natural and human threats and to clarify what Joyce might have meant to say to them led to endeavours to get a better view of the sky and its signs. These were called eyes because they were both openings and observatories and each group had a single eye used for divination and rituals, of initiution, of marriage, of burial. Because the first cultures were all Cyclopean on account of their allegiance to each family to its own altar this gave rise to the mistaken depiction of the Cyclops as monsters with single eyes of the kind that Odysseus encountered during his travels, Instead the first eyes connected earth to heaven with acts of ritual divination looking for meanings to attach to Jove’s generic meaningfulness and because Jove was imagined as a giant body the sky was thought to be the skull of Jove, below it or within it was the visible world, above it was a divine ideal represented by the peaks of mountains or the sacred precincts of citadels above cities such as the Acropolis at Athens. And most importantly Jove’s skull connected directly with imaginative universals.
‘Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia’
[‘We seek after heaven itself in our foolishness’].
‘It was certainly pious giants of this sort that Plato recognized in the Polyphemus of Homer, and we are emboldened by what Homer tells us of this same giant, where he makes Polyphemus say that an augur, who had been among them at one time, had predicted the disgrace that he would later suffer at the hands of Ulysses, for augurs certainly do not live among atheists’.
‘At that time, poetic morals took its start from piety, for piety was ordered by providence for the founding of the nations, among all of which piety is commonly understood as the mother of all the virtues pertaining to moral, economic, and civil life. And religion alone makes the work of virtue effectual, for philosophy is better at reasoning about virtue’.
- ‘The New Science’
More about imaginative universals and what they are later. So much to be said. Well, I am making this a 10 part series in line with the 10 thunder words of the Wake, a sudden eruption, followed by a new train of thought. I will just conclude for now with this. It has been contended that there exists between Vico and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), certain similarities which are sufficiently evident to have given rise to a well-supported albeit much-disputed tradition of interpretation in which Vico’s thought is regarded in an Hegelian light, the most influential and cogent version of this interpretation to be found in Benedetto Croce’s, (1866–1952), ‘La fllosofia di G. B. Vico’, wherein among several affinities that Croce observed were those between Vico’s endeavour to relate philosophy to philology and Hegel’s identification of thought and being, Vico’s recognition of the limited nature of mathematics and the exact sciences and Hegel’s repudiation of the reality of the fruits of the abstract intellect, Vico’s theory of the poetic mind and Hegel’s view of art as one of the forms of absolute mind, their combined repudiation of the possibility of any form of society which lacked religion, and, finally, the identity of Vico’s concept of providence and Hegel’s cunning of reason, (see my articles The Cunning of Reason parts one to four).
Many of the similarities to which Croce drew attention are real enough but there are fundamental differences between the thought of the two philosophers in virtue of his reading of both being mediated by the development of his own philosophy of spirit. and Croce’s ground breaking study set in motion a a great deal of research on Vico much of which has issued in views quite contrary to Croce’s own, that is how philosophy works. These can be in general categorised in the following manner. First there is a naturalistic interpretation in which Vico views humanity as part of the physical world and is concerned to extend the methods of the natural sciences in which he was indubitably interested to the study of human history. Alternatively such a view can be used to explain the long-standing notion that Vico purposively obfuscated some of his views in order not to run into trouble with the Catholic censors. Secondly, there is a series of interpretations which centre around the idea that Vico was concerned with the differences between the human as a social and historical being and the natural world in which he or she lived and which offer alternative accounts of the methodology by which he thought we could come to knowledge of human history. Isaiah Berlin, (1909–1997), placed great emphasis upon the imagination as an indispensable requirement of knowledge of history. And B. A. Haddock whose ideas are a bit fishy presents Vico as sharing the interest of his humanist predecessors in the interpretation of documents and artefacts in general and as being primarily concerned to produce a canon for their interpretation which allowed for their specificity within unique historical cultures. And, Donald Phillip Verene, (1937 — ), contends that the imagination in its primary mode is made central to Vico’s account of the ontology of the historical world and, in its secondary mode, as the recollective imagination, is fundamental to his account of knowledge of that world. But is not the role of imagination in Vico’s methodology meant to be scientific in a rather unusual way?
Whatever, it is profitable to take advantage of some of these similarities in understanding Vico’s view of the relationship between human nature and history and how he thought the historian should address the problems to which this gave rise, and to those who rebuff the significance of the similarities to proceed in such a manner may appear to risk the danger of assimilating Vico’s thought to that of a later age and thus to fail to do justice to it in its own terms, and such a danger indeed exists but it is not inescapable nor indeed would it justify paying no attention to the similarities, some of which are quite striking. Both thinkers were very well read in the history of their subjects and it would be an error to presuppose a priori that they might not have seen their work in part at the very least as a response to certain similar problems. It is plausible for instance to view much of Hegel’s work as an endeavour to overcome the stultifying dichotomy between the phenomenal and the noumenal which Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), forced upon himself by his excessive admiration for the natural sciences and which led him to relegate some of the most important features of the human, freedom, morality and rational self-determination, to the unknowable world of the noumenal.
Much of Hegel’s work can be viewed as an endeavour to make such noumenal aspects constitutive principles within the world of human experience, and Vico similarly was down-hearted by the arid dualism to which the Cartesian, (René Descartes, (1596–1650), search for certainty had led and which separated the human’s essence from the social and historical context in which his or her capacities are nurtured and developed and in which many of them receive their historical content. Much of his thought can be seen as an endeavour to overcome this dualism by emphasising the conditioning effect of the social and historical context upon human nature, as had been argued in the educational, social, political and jurisprudential writings of his Renaissance predecessors.
And furthermore, just as Kant’s dualism followed from an epistemological position which had to be overcome if Hegel were to view humanity’s historical development as a teleological, self-determining process, so Descartes’s followed from an epistemological position which had to be overcome if Vico were to pay due regard to the way in which humanity had developed historically. For if, as Descartes asserted, the certain knowledge of mind which we possessed was possible only if mind had an ahistorical and asocial essence, it was impossible to see how many of the assumptions involved in education, politics, jurisprudence, and so on, which presupposed the necessity for a social, cultural and historical context, could be sustained.
There is just no end to the pathway to despair that is philosophy, time for a song, sorry I am unable to find a musical setting:
‘Song’
by William Congreve, (1670–1729)
Love’s but the frailty of the mind
When ’tis not with ambition joined;
A sickly flame, which, if not fed, expires,
And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.
’Tis not to wound a wanton boy
Or amorous youth, that gives the joy;
But ’tis the glory to have pierced a swain,
For whom inferior beauties sighed in vain.
Then I alone the conquest prize
When I insult a rival’s eyes;
If there’s delight in love, ’tis when I see
That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.
‘I put hem behind the oasthouse, sagd Pukkelsen, tuning wound on the teller, appeased to the cue, that double dyode dealered, and he’s wallowing awash swill of the Tarra water. And it marinned down his gargantast trombsathletic like the marousers of the gulpstroom. The kersse of Wolafs on him, shitateyar, he sagd in the fornicular, and, at weare or not at weare, I’m sigen no stretcher, for I carsed his murhersson goat in trotthers with them newbucklenoosers behigh in the fire behame in the oasthouse. Hops! sagd he’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
Note: double dyode dealered: diode, a thermionic valve of the simplest kind with just two electrodes: and doubledyed, dyed twice, figuratively deeply imbued or stained with guilt and so on, and double diode valve as in a radio, and dear dirty Dublin, and Congreve’s comic play ‘The Double Dealer’, wherein Mellefont, nephew and prospective heir of Lord Touchwood is about to marry Cynthia, Lady Touchwood, a violent and jealous woman, from which much hilarity ensues, I don’t quite see the funny side of it myself but I won’t bring into the discussion my own experiences of marriage I have digressed enough already ..
The second thunder word of the Wake:
Perkun: Lithuanian thunder-god. Perun is the Slavic one.
kurun (Breton): thunder
barg (Persian): thunder
griauja (Lithuanian): it thunders
gök gürliy or (Turkish): thundering sky
grom grmi (Serbian): thunder thunders
guntur (Malay): thunder
thruma (ON): thunder
thuna (Rumanian): thunder
radi (Kiswahili): thunder
dill (Arabic): thunder
failitily (Samoan): thunder
bumulloj (Albanian): thunder
ukkonen (Finnish): thunder
‘Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifait itillibumullunukkunun!’
To be continued …
