Giambattista Vico · Civilisations
Vico’s recovery of how the first humans thought - not in abstract reason but in vivid poetry, myth, and imagination - and his method for entering the mind of the distant past.
One of Vico’s most original and profound achievements was his recovery of the lost mode of thought of early humanity - what he called ‘poetic wisdom’ (sapienza poetica). Vico argued that the first humans did not think as we do, in abstract concepts and rational arguments, but in a fundamentally different mode: in vivid, concrete images, in myths and poetry, in imaginative and sensory pictures rather than abstract ideas. Early humanity’s wisdom was ‘poetic’ - expressed in and structured by myth, poetry, vivid imagery, and the imagination, rather than abstract reason. To understand the first humans and their world, Vico saw, we must recover this lost poetic mode of thought - enter into the imaginative, mythic, poetic mind of early humanity, so different from our own abstract and rational way of thinking.
From this insight, Vico developed a revolutionary method: reading the myths, fables, and poetry of early peoples as historical evidence - as the encoded memory and expression of the real history, institutions, and experience of early humanity. The myths, Vico argued, are not random fantasies but the poetic expression of real historical experience: they encode, in mythic and poetic form, the real history, social institutions, struggles, and experience of early humanity. By interpreting the myths - decoding their poetic and mythic expression to recover the real historical experience they encode - Vico believed we could recover the otherwise lost history of early humanity, the history of the obscure ages before written records, preserved in encoded form in the myths and poetry of the nations. The myths of Greece and Rome, read aright, were the encoded memory of the real history of those nations’ early ages - their social conflicts, their institutions, their development - preserved in poetic form. This method of reading myth as encoded history, recovering the lost history of early humanity from its myths and poetry, was one of Vico’s most original and influential contributions.
Vico pioneered one of the most important and difficult arts of historical understanding: the sympathetic imagination - the capacity to enter imaginatively into the radically different mentality of the past, to reconstruct from within the ways of thinking and experiencing of people fundamentally unlike ourselves. Because the people of the past (especially the distant past) thought, felt, and experienced the world in fundamentally different ways from us, understanding them requires more than observing their external behaviour or projecting our own mentality onto them; it requires entering imaginatively into their different mentality, reconstructing from within how the world appeared to them, recovering their alien ways of thinking and experiencing. This sympathetic historical imagination - the imaginative reconstruction of the alien mentality of the past, the entering-into ways of thinking radically different from our own - is one of the most important and difficult arts of historical and cultural understanding, and Vico was one of its great pioneers. It founds the whole project of understanding the past, and other cultures, in their own terms - entering into their different ways of thinking and experiencing, rather than judging them by our own - that became central to modern historical and cultural understanding.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Vico recovered the ‘poetic wisdom’ of early humanity - its imaginative, mythic mode of thought. Explain what poetic wisdom was and how Vico tried to understand it, in your own words.
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