The Hegelian Return to The Barbarism of Reflection in the Light of the Vichian Imagination of Power
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Beschreibung
Vico's utterly imaginative and poetical way of writing has led many exegetes to consider his revolutionary thought as premonitory whether in social, political, historical or juridical matters. To read Vico is to delve into both Modernity and Post-Modernity, into Greco-Roman classical authors and the latest contemporary insights. The temptation was unavoidable to rediscover in many Vichian writings the justification for controversial questions which have still some bearing in the philosophical discourse. One such attempt to praise the Vichian intuitions consisted in digging out some pressuposed Vichian theories, which the author himself almost constantly combatted in what he called the barbarism of reflection. Vico was definitely not a theorist, or a systemic thinker although the organisation of his thought into axioms and principles may induce any reader to search for normativity in the presentation of the Vichian New Science. Vico never departed from the idea of invention, creation even when the purpose of his New Science was to give substantial insight into the becoming of humanity from a previous biblical perspective. However, in attempting to insert Marx, Hegel, Cassirer, Kant, or Jung into the frame of every single Vichian text, many exegetes have failed consciously or not to pay tribute to one of Vico's fundamental desire to give to humanity a new comprehensive architecture of human becoming, which would not be limited to the historical one. Any restrictive perception of Humanity's becoming, based on historical time would be insufficient to provide for the eternal dimension which Vico seems to depict throughout his works thanks to the role of Providence. The discourse of eternity is constantly enhanced by Vico's imagination of the human destinity outside the mere lens of History.
Obviously, History can only be eternal for Vico, that is to say providential and related to the enigmatic future that always escapes Man's weak reason. Vico is a thinker of eternity, of God, of the Cosmos, of Infinity, of Chaos, of everything that is beyond the human soul, body and hand's reach, or profoundly infinite within himself. In that sense, Vico has remained genuinely human, as he enabled every representative of the human species to enter the realm of becoming, of progress, barbarism and civilization, expanding his conception of what is essentially human to the biological modifications of man's environment. Vico's power of encompassing the historical arena into the vaster stage of divine intervention gives him at least the possibility to examine a posteriori the slow process of human progress in knowledge and consciousness, which he first intuited as the development of reason against the barbarism of senses. Our legitimate claim is to pay tribute to the Vichian laws of eternal and ideal history by ensuring a new interpretation of an author like Hegel. By promoting the principle of eternity, the comparativist approach would then cease to search for an a posteriori validity of a modern or post-modern philosopher's theoretical views, and put emphasis on the place occupied by Hegel's most crucial stances within the vast frame of the Vichian eternal destiny of humanity. Indeed, once inserted within the Vichian space of human evolution, many modern thinkers are perceived under a more genuine light, which alternates between philosophical barbarism and civilization. The claim for a Vichian comprehensiveness and insertion has to be justified. Vico's plea of the eternal laws of history have a sound anthropological grounding in the linkage he operates between God and Nature, in his infinite providential choices. Furthermore, Vico's epistemological intentions are related to the ideal eternal laws of History in what concerns the modifications of the human mind itself. The relationship between the Idea, its temporal appearance, and the historical modifications of the human mind is not only contingent and Vico would wish to peruse their underlying laws. He therefore sets the limits of his historical anthropology in the originary structure of the human mind which is a posse, nosse, velle finitum quod tendit ad infinitum. Endowed respectively with the power of actualization, of the will to knowledge and of a sustaining will to spiritual existence, he might tend to an Infinitum so long as he remains a finitum. This tension never seems to be resolved and accounts for the true human nature. Furthermore, Vico is not reluctant to put the question of human history in its most unsuspected elements, the physical and aesthetical ones, which have their roots in a biblical and real account of animal and human transformations. The historical axis of the Gentiles taken by Vico, supposedly purified from a pristine and sacred biblical history, gives him the occasion to announce the primacy of the poetic primitive mind in the constitution of the human spirit. One of our fundamental approaches to Hegel's phenomenological appearances of the Spirit will therefore find its justification in the primacy of the poetical moment, as postulated by Vico. As Caponigri asserts, Vico reassesses the pre-logical and aesthetic moments of human thinking, as a-historical forms of the human structure of Spirit. While many authors already proclaimed the definitive separation of the human and the animal kingdoms, Vico reasserts the most brilliant biblical transformations of humanity in philosophical terms. Infact, Vico is certainly more authentic in avoiding to proclaim the absolute reign of abstract human reason over the ferocious animality. There are eternal laws which the human kind cannot escape for ever, and some of them are related to the barbarism of senses, which modernity too rapidly and despicably deemed as obsolete. Vico never rejects the idea of a resurgence of the past in the form decided and specified by God through his providential interventions. Therefore, it would be inadequate to neglect the power of Nature as an Instrument of God, whose full knowledge exclusively remains in his hands. Thus, in view of our topic, the modern conception of a Nature bound to be mastered by the force of reason will be a decisive stance in accounting for the emergence of political power from an anthropological point of view. Likewise, the principle of eternity lies in every single Vichian reflection. It is above all salient in his perception of Nature which is infinite, all pervasive, ferocious and providential. Vico stands above any modern reading by just proclaiming the absolute reign of Nature as a sign of divine providence. It is a slow process of sedimentation of physical elements which continues up to the human flesh, from the first biblical and historical outbursts of life. Vico will not conceal the powerful presence of the natural scenery, with its most terrific aspects to engage in a philosophical discussion about the nature of the first political commonwealths. While many authors would argue for the human ability to overcome the chaotic natural setting by the use of mere reason, Vico intends to show that an absolute victory upon the barbarism of senses is never quite achieved, especially when it comes to politics. In search for the true nature of human destiny, Vico remains cautious about the possibilities of human Reason. If there is a rational order to identify in the divine creation, then Nature came prior to form the first processes of intellection against the presence of a truely developped reason. And such an order of things must be taken into account before any rejection of the natural forces, in their most terrific aspects which have surrounded humanity when it was supposedly still weak in reason. Vico also discarded the epistemological turn implemented by the cartesian foundation of a rationalistic ego, as the sacred via of salvation. Hegel did not, by stating that the rational idea of Absolute Knowledge can be achieved by the human mind created by God.
Autor*in
Arab Kennouche