This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
The remarkable achievement of Giambattista Vico has long since been recognized and acknowledged by Benedetto CroceLa filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1911); revised edition 1947 and by Croce's English translator, the British philosopher, R. G. Collingwood,The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (London: Latimer, 1913). I am of course greatly indebted to Professor Max H. Fisch for his introduction to the English translation ofLa scienza nuova: The New Science of Giambattista Vico) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968); revised unabridged edition; and to the excellent translation he and Thomas Goddard Bergin have provided for us in English. All quotations are from the 1968 English translation.
Cf.The New Science, p. 112 [sec. 367]: ... We shall show clearly and distinctly how the founders of a gentile humanity by means of their natural theology (or metaphysics) imagined the gods; how by means of their logic they invented languages; by morals created heroes; by economics, founded families, and by politics, cities; by their physics, established the beginnings of things as all divine; by the particular physics of man, in a certain sense created themselves ... Max Fisch comments in the introduction, p. xliv: The rationalistic theory assumed that the institutions of society were made by “men”, in the sense of human beings who were already fully human, in whom the humanity of Vico's “age of men” was already fully developed. What Vico wanted to assert was that the first steps in the building of the “world of nations” were taken by creatures who were still beasts, and that humanity itself was created by the very same process by which institutions were created. Humanity is not a presupposition, but a consequence, an effect, a product of institution building [C6, J2]. Vico indeed carries this so far as to assert that it was not only in respect of mind or spirit, but in respect of body or “corporature”, also, that these creatures-not-yet-human made themselves human [520, 692]. This cryptic comment has been taken up in depth by André Missenard,A la Recherche de l'homme, English trans. L. G. Blochman,In Search of Man (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1957): “Thought is the slave of our means of expression ... The intellectual capital of a nation is invested in its language,” p. 267.
The New Science, p. 120 [sec. 384]: All that has been so far said here upsets all the theories of the origin of poetry from Plato and Aristotle down to Patrizzi, Scaliger, and Castelvetro [807]. For it has been shown that it was deficiency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry so sublime that the philosophies which came afterward, the arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better, and have even prevented its production. Robert Caponigri,Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambatista Vico (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), [First published London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953] comments: The heart of the Viconean conception of poetry, and his great discovery is its necessity, p. 165. ... Early documents are poetic in form, even in the most external sense of the term, because the consciousness of early man was itself intimately and constitutively poetic. Poetry consequently, becomes the defining term of the inner quality of the first time form movement which he [Vico] has to this point characterized as spontaneous and which he has further analysed into the sense-phantasy complex. And poetic becomes the adjective by which he designates and describes the whole pre-reflective life of man ... p. 166.
Cf.The New Science, pp. 65–66 [sec. 147–159].
The philosophy of language of Wilhelm von Humboldt has finally come into its time. In our age of post-structuralist theory, it would do every theorist well to read the key passages of his philosphy of language written for the most part in his later years; an excellent selection and translation of these writings are contained in Marianne Cowan's anthology,An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt: Humanist Without Portfolio (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963) the pertinent chapter is “Man's Intrinsic Humanity: His language,” pp. 235–298. I cite from p. 235ff: All understanding is also a misunderstanding. No one when he uses a word has in mind exactly the same thing that another has, and the difference, however tiny, sends its tremors throughout language, if one may compare language with the most volatile element. With each thought, each feeling, this difference returns, thanks to the element of unvarying identity in individuality, and finally forms a mass of elements which singly went unnoticed. All understanding, therefore, is always at the same time a misunderstanding — this being a truth which it is most useful to know in practical life- and all agreement of feelings and thoughts is at the same time a means for growing apart [Werke V, 396]. Language everywhere mediates, first between infinite and finite nature, then between one individual and another. Simultaneously and through the same act it makes union possible and itself originates from it. The whole of its nature never lies in singularity but must always simultaneously be guessed or intuited from otherness. [Werke III, 296-7] Every language sets certain limits to the spirit of those who speak it; it assumes a certain direction and, by doing so, excludes others. [Werke VII, 621]
Language, Culture and Personality, p. 162. The key issue here and throughout these essays is the rejection of the purported objective real world of anthropologists: “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.”
Lévi-Strauss' kinship with the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf concept of man as world-maker is fully documented and does not require detailed attention on my part; there are however significant differences between the relational development I have been examining and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Let me begin with a quotation fromLa pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]: This reciprocity of perspectives, in which man and the world mirror each other and which seems to us the only possible explanation of the properties and capacities of the savage mind, we thus find transposed to the plane of mechanized civilization. ... The beings confront each other face to face as subjects and objects at the same time; and in the code they emply, a simple variation in the distance separating them has the force of a silent adjuration. (p. 222) Language being the primary code of world-making, it follows that the Jakobson-Lévi-Strauss concept of language is the focal point of our enquiry into the development of the relational idea. The idea that language is a closed system of signs and that within this system each element refers to other elements in the system clearly separates structuralism from the relational concept of Vico. To Lévi-Strauss language cannot refer to anything outside itself since it is a self-constituted world. It is instructive to note that Lévi-Strauss faulted B. L. Whorf's studies for lacking an integrating theory, that is, a concept of closed system cf. p. 85.Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), English trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf,Structural Anthropology (London: Allen Lane, 1968). The critique of Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach is very useful especially Chapter 5, “Words and Things”,Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana-Collins, 1970). For further study of Benjamin Lee Whorf see George Steiner,After Babel (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 88–94.
See myShadows in the Cave: A Phenomenological Approach to Literary Criticism Based on Hispanic Texts (Toronto: University ol Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 3–14.
In these remarks on Barthes I am indebted to Terence Hawkes' lucid bookStructuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 106–122. The sources from Barthes are Roland Barthes,Le degré zéro de l'écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), English trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith,Writing Degree Zero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967);Eléments de sémiologie (Paris: Seuil, 1964), English trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), and finally the most extensive theoretical bookS/Z (Paris: Seuil), English trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
Wolfgang Iser,The Implied Reader (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 274. I also wish to acknowledge Professor Iser's article “Narrative Strategies as a Means of Communication” inInterpretation of Narrative edited by M. J. Valdés and O. J. Miller, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 100–117 as well asThe Act of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) which have been a major influence in the development of my theoretical thinking.
See Hans Robert Jauss, “Theses on the Transition from the Aesthetics of Literary Works to a Theory of Aesthetic Experience” inInterpretation of Narrative, pp. 137–147.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Valdés, M. Relational literary theory and comparative literary history. Neohelicon 13, 45–60 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028899
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02028899