Pagina 24 - BCSV, XLI, 2

LEON POMPA 24
would not help Vico to expand the faculties of poetic man sufficiently
as to enable him to secure his physical survival along with that of his
progeny, the matter can be pursued in another way: by giving a differ-
ent and less mechanistic reading to the admission that early man had
the power of sensing the natural world. The key to this lies in recogniz-
ing that sense perception is not simply a blind causal transaction
between our senses and the natural world, and that it requires various
powers of discrimination. If we ask what is required to sense the differ-
ent necessities of life, we need various powers of discrimination which
enable us to distinguish between various different kinds of things, such
as, for example, between fresh and poisonous liquids or salt water in
order not to perish from fatal dehydration. Water is not, of course, the
only source from which we can provide for this need. It can be derived
from many fruits and berries and other products of the botanical
world. And the same applies, of course, to our ability to supply our
need for various animal products. But the basic point here is that what
Vico, possibly following Locke, treated as a simple causal transaction
between our senses and the material world, is a skill which requires
powers of discrimination, involving the ability to perceive various
things of different kinds. This ability is precisely what Vico called inge-
nium in De antiquissima, a faculty he there identified with human
nature but one which unfortunately, although consistently with his view
of the mechanistic theory of animal nature, he explicitly denied of
‘brutes’26. Thus, by failing to analyse sense perception in itself, and pro-
ducing different accounts of the way in which it operates in humans
and in animals, he has made it impossible to use this reading to defend
him from Croce’s criticism: that poetic man, lacking concepts, could
have had no ability to think27.
VII. We must return now to the implications of this view for Vico. I
shall start by considering the most drastic of them. First, as mentioned
earlier, it means that his entire description of the lifestyle of poetic man
26 Ivi, p. 97. In this work Vico failed to realise that his account of our active men-
tal capacities was not compatible with the naturalistic view of the workings of the body,
which he endorsed, possibly influenced by the theories of Leonardo di Capua.
27 Since the extent to which our rational abilities presuppose unconscious abilities
which we may share with animals is very much in question in cognitive psychology at
the present time, I shall not attempt here to pursue further the possibilities inherent in
Vico’s recognition that we are parts of the animal kingdom.