Pagina 21 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 21
physics was their poetry17, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished
by nature with these senses and imagination)18.
V. In discussing this passage, it is necessary to take account of Croce’s
well- known remarks in his ground-breaking monograph 19, about the
view of human nature it presents. In this work Croce advanced two
fundamental criticisms which bear on Vico’s account of the progressive
rationality of the life of a nation. One was of the concept of the imagi-
native universal, which, he argued, lacked any true form of the univer-
sality required for real thought, and thus deprived poetic man of con-
cepts, with the result that Vico was unable to explain how rationality
arose from such a non-rational basis 20. Since I have already developed
17 Vico’s concept of poetry is ambiguous as between a capacity and the products of
that capacity. What he means in this context is made clear subsequently when he
explains how these men, by means of their ‘wholly corporeal imagination’ created the
world in which they believed they lived and because they created by using their imagi-
nation, they were called ‘poets’, which is Greek for ‘creators’ (ivi , 376). Thus poetry
here refers to a creative imagination, which is furnished by nature. He then proceeds
to talk of three social functions which he attributes to poetry: to invent sublime fable
suitable to the popular understanding; to perturb to excess, with a view to that end;
and to teach the vulgar to act virtuously, as the poets have taught themselves. But it is
difficult to see how these intentional attributes of poetry could be provided by nature
in the same way as the faculty of poetry is said to be, or that they could exist other than
in an educational context, which cannot operate in the putative brutish environment.
The difficulty is compounded when Vico frequently invokes the same three properties
of poetry even when discussing literary products such as plays and poems, which
employ and depend upon well understood conventions, rthe use of which Vico reser-
ves for his ‘human’ times. It is difficult, therefore, not to conclude that in his desire to
show that all human practices sprang by necessity from rudimentary natural mental
functions, Vico has inserted anachronistically in the earlier stages some features of a
later age. Croce notes this point in the chapter on Vico in Part 2 of his Aesthetic , but
dismisses it as an aberration on Vico’s part.
18 Sn44, 375.
19 B. CROCE, La filosofia di G. B. Vico (1911), Bari 1965. I shall confine my
remarks largely to Croce’s analysis in this work for Croce referred to Vico in so many
different ways in relation to his own philosophy of spirit that it would not be feasi-
ble here to attribute to him a single definitive view of Vico. For an interesting and
scholarly tracing of some of Croce’s writings on Vico, see the essay, by M. H. FISCH ,
Croce and Vico, in Thought, Action and Intuition as a Symposium on the Philosophy
of Benedetto Croce, eds. L. M. Palmer and H. S. Harris, Hildesheim and New York,
1975, pp. 184-233.
20 CROCE, op. cit., pp. 59-61