poetic wisdom, Vico

Vico describes poetic wisdom as a whole modality of knowledge that developed historically, from “crude” beginnings, by which he means the necessity to explain and communicate. 

This modality was a metaphysics: the necessity of communication and explanation was first of all a way of “making sense” (also in relation to the senses) by linking natural phenomena to a divine plan, and explain the order of the world by reference to an entity.

This modality expanded (we can think of what Deleuze writes about the refrain) and differentiated in several differing modalities, each concerned both with a certain domain of knowledge. Language, logic, morals, economics, politics but also physics, astronomy (and chronology and geography) all articulated from such necessity, and were all in their own way “poetic.”

This is what Vico refers to as “history of human nature” a view therefore that underlines—we would say in contemporary parlance—nature as a becoming.

An historical approach also entails an understanding that such poetic wisdom is both different and related to “scientific wisdom” (what at times Vico calls “civilized nature”). Different, because it is not Christian, and because it ignores the “scientific causes” that organize nature. Related, because scientific wisdom is a product of poetic wisdom and could not be without it. This relational difference has theological roots, and can be retrospectively seen as an important axis of anthropology as a discipline about difference (and sameness). We could say that it encapsulates the “political-theology” of anthropology as a European/Nord-American discipline.

Some of you might have in mind L-S distinction between “savage” and “scientific thought,” and his argument about their ultimate identity. But in Vico the link is historical (and recursive) and disjunctive.