Ontogenèse de l’esprit vichien et structures imaginatives chez Hegel

Ontogenesis of spirit in Vico and imaginative structures in Hegel. This essay discusses somefunctions of imagination as Vico depicted them in their biblical, historical and ontogenetical aspects. The Vichian nascimento of thought as imagination aims at defining the realrelationship between mind and body outside their often false opposition. The archeology of thinking does not rest on a presumptive centered substance governing the human flesh and passions, but on a network of powerful images, enabling the first humans to implement their faculty of intellection as acuity. Reason is absent from the first processes of intelligence, as they are depicted in the New Science, first of all with the “Second Fall”. Moving from here, the paper proposes a comparison with the structure of imagination in Hegel’s philosophy, taken as a model of the primacy of a logic and divinereason, and suggests a path to interpretate even Hegel’s concept of Geist through Vico’s laws of imagination.