Sunday, May 19, 2024 : TES > Documents > Epic > Spirit

The Epic

Vico and the “Discovery of the True Homer”

Vico’s Method

Vico’s elements, principles, and method provide the foundation of The New Science and are interwoven throughout the work. One really cannot understand any one of these aspects of Vichian thought without at least becoming exposed the others. Vico’s The New Science approaches history in a cyclical manner, seeing the corsi and recorsi—the flow and ebb of humanity and its institutions—as recurring death and life of human achievement following the guidance of providence.

The elements of Vico’s science are axioms that illuminate the conventional wisdom behind his mythology. Within the outline of the elements, Vico first discusses the fallacies that underlie a misrepresentation of human history: the conceit of nations and the conceit of scholars. They both rest on a conceit that present philosophy provided an initial foundation for both nations and scholarship. Vico suggests that after the flood, men first lived on the mountain, later came down from the mountain to the plains, and then approached the sea [295]. Vico, through this metaphor, shows that the development of human institutions happened gradually—they evolved through time and sensus communis.

Vico suggests that men are by nature sociable, and through a critical examination of social institutions, one might dispel the “night of thick darkness” [331]. These principles on which a nation builds its social institutions are religion, marriage, and burial [333].

Yet, just studying the principles of human institutions is not enough; one must also ascribe to a specific methodology. Vico simply starts at the beginning, which relates back to the elements: a discussion of method “must begin where its subject matter began, as we said in the Axioms” [338]. That is, we have to “descend from these human and refined natures [those natures that perpetuate the conceits of nations and scholars] of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort” [338]. Indeed, leaving behind an “evolved” ethos—one based on Cartesian thought—will prove difficult for both Vico’s contemporaries and twentieth-century thinkers.

Vico’s approach, combining the elements, principles, and methodology, presents a universality of history, or a “rational civil theology of divine providence” [341]. This reconstruction of history, Vico believed, could reconnect humanity with the poetic code. By rediscovering and contemplating its origins, humanity could regain an imaginative sensibility that has been lost in an age of Cartesian thought.

This process begins with what Vico calls “poetic metaphysics,” which states that religion was created by a deficiency of human reason [384]. The ancient poets (giganti, gentiles, gentes, vulgar people—Vico uses these terms interchangeably throughout the NS), in an effort to explain the terrors of nature, react to the thunder and create a cause for the thunder: Jove. This “credible impossibility” became the first religions among the gentiles; through a sheer act of imagination these theological poets give “birth to wonder” which has not been matched since [383, 377, 384]. Since this creation is guided by the providence of God, these gentiles provide the genesis of religious thought and devotion by suggesting that “divine providence watches over the welfare of all mankind” [385]; all things come from Jove, especially the law [398].

“Poetic logic” is concerned with the substance of particulars, or signifiers and the signified. Names, too, come from the gods; the theological poets endowed all substances—all things—with names associated with their divinities: “By means of these three divinities É they explained everything appertaining to the sky, the earth, and the sea” [402]. So, by means of the particular, a logos was developed. The theological poets, unlike the abstract thinkers in the age of men, “attributed senses and passions . . . to bodies, and to bodies as vast as sky, sea, and earth” [402]. Their logos was constructed around metonymy, or the vivid image of detail that represents the whole topic. This logos became a mythology (“true speech” [401]) out of which grew allegories or fables (archetypes) like Achilles connoting the idea of valor, or Odysseus symbolizing wisdom [403]. Finally, irony, when the image acquired a point of reference of its own and loses the connection to the original signified, represents the point when the cycle of poetic logic can start all over again with new links between the signified and the signifier [408-11].

“Poetic morality” stems from the theological poets’ reaction to the thunderbolt of Jove: it made them god-fearing and became the source of their morality [502]. Vico continues: “From this nature of human institutions arose the eternal property that minds to make good use of the knowledge of God must humble themselves” [502]. The fear of Jove sent the giants into their caves where marriage was born out of a need for self-preservation: “Thus poetic morality began with piety, which was ordained by providence to found the nations” [503-4]. Through this initial religious piety, humans grew strong, industrious, magnanimous, and temperate [516].

Vico’s Poetic Wisdom

Vico defines wisdom in his discussion of “Poetic Wisdom”: “Wisdom is the faculty which commands all of the disciplines by which we acquire all of the sciences and arts that make up humanity” [364]. Wisdom illuminates “by knowledge of the highest institutions” and leads the spirit to choose what is best [364]. Since Vico states that divine justice regulates all human justice [341] and manifests itself naturally in humanity’s institutions, then humanity may derive wisdom by studying what it has built and the process that has precipitated that growth: its own institutions and their creation. Since wisdom comes from God, “the science of eternal things revealed by God” [365], Vico distinguishes between three types of theology: poetic, natural, and Christian.

Vico’s road always travels from the beginnings of ideas and institutions to their evolved states; this method holds true for his types of theology as well. The poetic theology constitutes the initial civil institutions of primitive people, or giganti; the natural theology is the practice of the “metaphysicians” who “by means of their natural theology (or metaphysics) imagined the gods; how by means of their logic they invented languages; by morals created heroes; by economics founded families, and by politics, cities,” et cetera [367]; and Christian theology, the apotheosis of wisdom, combines the former two “in the contemplation of divine providence” [366]. I assume, based upon my reading, that a representative of the former group would be Achilles, the mean group would be Homer or Plato, and the latter Saint Augustine or, perhaps, Vico himself.

This theology begins with the age of gods as the simplest people responded in fear to the thunder [178, 377]. This thunder first brings people together into communities and then joins the fearful emotions with this external stimulus to provide the basis of sensus communis, a “mental language common to all nations” [161]; in other words, mythology is born. The language of this era is as primitive as the peoples’ understanding; made up of yelps and squawks of emotion, humans’ first archaic language was based on imagination, and not on reason [185], signs and specific references rather than abstract generalizations. This “poetic wisdom [was] a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination” [375].

Through the imagination of people in response to a higher force, humanity makes societal institutions, ushering in the age of heroes; where all nations have their Joves, all also have their Herculeses [193, 196]. During this age, the people grew stronger, evolved an agrarian culture, and developed a social hierarchy [31]. The cave becomes a feudal fief, and the hero a despot. The language undergoes a similar metamorphosis: crude symbols and words become metaphorical—the language of heroes and poetry [32]. This was a language of “heroic emblems” comprised of “metaphors, images, similitudes, or comparisons, which, having passed into articulate speech, supplied all the resources of poetic expression” [438].

Finally, in the age of men, a Christian theology dominates a language of abstract generalization. This age of monarchies and commonwealths the height of man’s accomplishment and also precipitates his downfall, or recorsi.

All of these historical groups—the evolution of the historical process from one group to another—are governed by divine providence [366]. By providence, Vico suggests that the progression of history—even the raw age of giants and the present age of Cartesian modernity as he outlines it—is the creation of God and, therefore, concurs with a grand design. Vico suggests that through the study of man’s social institutions, which are worldly manifestations of divine justice and the providence of God, humans can understand the principles of universal history, divine justice, and wisdom [368].

Similar to Plato’s cave, Vico uses the metaphor of the dark forest. Vico, like Plato’s philosopher, is attempting to lead humanity out of the dark forest by illustrating the history of human development; by an understanding of this development—a development guided by the providence of God—humans might return to “piety, faith, and truth which are the natural foundations of justice as well as the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God” [1106]. So rather than acting from a selfish, Cartesian “I,” we may learn to think in terms of “an eternal and infinite good” [1110]. Piety, then for Vico, seems to be the foundation and end of wisdom.

Vico’s Homer

Vico, in his imaginative search for the true Homer, uses the language of reason combined with creative speculation and inductive hypothesizing. Homer, for Vico, is a metaphor for the citizens of ancient Greece. He did not exist as a man, but as a much more powerful entity who lived in the cultural consciousness of the entire nation. Homer himself became a myth—a integral myth for the emergence of Greek polity, poetry, and philosophy.

Vico suggests that Homer was the codifier of Greek culture. Homer, according to Vico, lived about 460 years, encompassing the time when marriage laid the foundation for Greek civility to when philosophers inserted philosophy into the texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey [901]. There could not have been a single man named Homer that could have written the entirety of Greek philosophy, poetry, and social institutions [897]. Yet, opines Vico, since Homer is considered the father of poetry, is venerated by the Greek philosophers, and is representative of all aspects of Greek decorum, he must be a product of the culture that came before and after.

Yet Homer, the idea of the poet, does not contain “sublime esoteric wisdom” like the later philosophers, but “base sentences, vulgar customs, crude comparisons, local idioms, licenses in meter, variations in dialect” and makes men into gods and gods into men [787, 883-8, 893-6]. Vico cites Achilles as a poor choice for a hero who should encompass sublime esoteric wisdom [786]. Also, the fact that many Greek cities claim the honor of having birthed Homer and the variety of dialects used in his epics, Vico interprets as evidence of his non-existence as a single person [788]. Additionally, Vico suggests that the Homeric epics, because they contain elements that do not fit into any one age—games, painting, writing, luxury and pomp, clothing, et cetera—that the poems “were composed and complied by various hands through successive ages” [804].

Vico’s language throughout The New Science, and particularly in “Discovery of the True Homer,” is very rational, yet his exploration remains faithful to the methodology he outlined previously. He starts with the particular, Homer, and fits him into the development of the gentile nation of Greece. In examining the history of Greece and attempting to fit the particular into the general, Vico speculates about the age in which Homer lived and his birthplace. Yet, since the two poems encompass what seems to be the entirety of Greek culture for about 500 years, he concludes that Homer himself was a fable constructed by a nation to codify its culture, poetry, and philosophy.

The true Homer, to Vico, is an institution. Homer’s “sublimity is inseparable from popularity,” and this popularity “first created heroic characters for themselves” from imagined universals; these ideas are products of poetic metaphysics [809]. In an effort to remember history and orient itself within nature, the culture narrates, in heroic language, its common history “enlarging particulars in imagination” [816]. It creates, via the poetic metaphysics, fables that explain nature without reflection, or a “lie that under every aspect has the appearance of the truth” [891]. These fables, then, become the remembered history of a gentile culture. This remembered history, in the form of The Iliad and The Odyssey, were written by its personification: Homer.

So the poet Homer used memory in three different ways to illuminate the history of Greece: “memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship” [819]. History, then, for Vico, is a bunch of fables that are compiled by poets, and represent the foundation for a modern culture.

The Birth of Reason

“Where does grammar come from?” asked on of my students one morning after complaining about another assignment. His question, while meant to be distracting, made me think of Vico and treat the question, in private, as very serious. Grammar, as part of the classical trivium, was the first instance of literary criticism. Grammar, as the contemporary student might interpret the word, is only part of the picture; indeed, grammar is the logical construction of words, but grammar is not itself, at least at its origins, logical. If Vico’s method of speculative hypothesizing were utilized in this matter, then certainly grammar cannot have existed before humanity’s need to express itself. Therefore, grammar cannot be based solely on reason. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, suggests that “grammar and narrative are the same thing” (244). Later, Frye states, reminiscent of Vichian thought, that there is “no evidence whatever that man learned to speak primarily because he wanted to speak logically” (332). So if grammar was born out of a non-rational need for expression, then Vico’s theory involving the origins of language and civilization seem most probable.

The rational, logical structuring of words is only a part of language. The other part of grammar is a reaction to language that already exists, like Homer’s epics. These epics, written in the third age of poets as a inaccurate culmination of the fables from the first two ages, precipitates a culture which produced them. Vico calls this process Homer. So long before Aristotle structured a grammar of poetics, Homer, the cultural mythology, constructed poetry from a people’s reaction to nature.

Homer is not a philosopher—a thinker, like Plato, that logically orders the abstract—but a poet who is the product of a cultural reaction—reactions based on emotional, imaginative, and particular stimuli. These stimuli, avers Vico, are Homer’s “proper materials” derived from “quite vulgar feelings and hence the vulgar customs of the barbarous Greece of his day” [781], and not a manifestation of the “sublime esoteric wisdom” of the philosopher [780]. The poet’s material is not the rational abstract, but the particular product of imagination: “credible impossibility” [383]. Through the poet’s imagination religion and society are constructed from his creative responses to the environment. In addition to his own responses, the poet’s subjects and his audience are the giganti; in an effort to tame and order the feral nature around him, the poet helps tame “the ferocity of the vulgar” [782]. The vulgar certainly would not understand sublime wisdom, nor would a poet of the vulgar be privy to such sagacity. His poetic wisdom—the first wisdom found in poetry—was created by the poet’s heroic mind.

Wisdom provides not only for the individual. Vico, in his speech “On the Heroic Mind,” states the pursuit of wisdom does not end with the individual, but must benefit the whole human race: “Prove to be heroes by enriching the human race with further giant benefits” (244). Homer’s enrichment of humanity comes in the form of culture, language, and imagination—not one man’s—but all creative individuals that came before him. Homer is heroic by recording that national identity for future generations of Greeks and all of the Western tradition. Homer takes from the community in order to help a greater community; his lesson is not certainty, but the truth of the sensus communis.

While Vico does not grant Homer Plato’s “sublime esoteric wisdom” [780], he does suggest that Homer is the most “sublime of all the sublime poets” [807]. Homer was not endowed with a conscious wisdom, evidenced by the immoral actions of his heroes and gods, but his poetry, because it was a product of the sensus communis, contained poetic falsehoods that were, nevertheless, universals, and therefore true. His poetic characters, since they were created by this powerful communal imagination, possess a sublimity and uniformity in that they are archetypal manifestations of Greek particulars: Achilles represents heroic valor, Odysseus, heroic wisdom [809]. These particulars, in the language of poetry, become synecdoches—parts that stand for the whole—and personifications of Greek ideals.

So Homer represents Vico’s idea of the Heroic Mind. Homer, whose individual existence is in question, stands for the entire Greek identity. He constructs a knowledge out of the community based on imagination and observation of his milieu. His poetry is not a manifestation of a single man’s rational thought, but is a holistic gestalt of three ages of Greek consciousness and identity. Homer preserves the giganti for the rational man who will come after him. Homer is not the individual, but the whole. By an understanding of Homer’s accomplishments, we, as seekers of wisdom, may shape ourselves into the wise and humane person that is actuated in the public life of the community.

In other words, Homer is memory. Vico gives memory three different aspects: “memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship” [819]. Not only are poets “the first historians of nations” [820], but they, as Aristotle observed later, are imitators—not of nature—but of humanity. Yet this memory is not the rational, Cartesian kind, but is colored by imagination and fables. Again, the poetry offers not certainty, but truth—truth in that these fables and imagination are the products of the community, and must be true. The verse of the poet, then, aids memory and perpetuates social institutions and ideals.

Contrary to Descartes’ philosophy, creative imagination precedes rational thought. Vico believed that the synthesis of reason and creativity produces meaningful human thought; the study toward this scienza may be achieved through the study of the liberal arts, one (but intimately tied to the rest) of which, is grammar. So, “where does grammar come from”? Certainly, grammar has its foundations in the particular “night of thick darkness” [331] before reason shed its abstract light to dispel that darkness. Logic and reason grew out of creativity and disorder, and one must give a nod to their ubiquitous purveyor: Homer.