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Vico’s Ring
129
commented on archaic art in certain contexts, but did not raise
art to the level of primordial status. From Vico’s perspective of
primacy in the development of human society, art as well as the
economic sphere are epiphenomena
277
.
This brief digression on art and economy was meant to cast
the “encyclopedic” scope of Book II
278
into a certain light, to put
the spotlight on its “poetic” intent, where “poetic” is a Vichian
technical term only tangentially related, albeit not absolutely un-
related, to literary genre and styles of expression. “Poetic”, simp-
ly put, is Vico’s “codeword” for two notions rolled into one,
first, diachronically, how things had to have been at the very be-
ginning of human civilization, and secondly, ontologically, as P.
Fabiani put it succinctly, «[p]oetry is the creation of meaning»
279
.
The encyclopedic range of Book II is thus consciously and
deliberately circumscribed and tightly controlled by Vico’s crite-
rium of such forces as were truly «originary»
280
, non-derivative, in
shaping human civilization. And, within the seeming plethora of
constitutive civilizing elements presented
seriatim
, an apposite
question might be whether there could be present any kind of
further structure, weighting, or clustering of elements that might
shed light on the Book’s inherent characteristics, its
eigenvalue
, so
to speak. This is where regarding Book II through the lens of
Book IV (that is, the part of Book IV that we consider to be
segment
C’
) becomes pertinent. Vico himself projected an arc
from Book II to Book IV: «Wherever, […] men begin to domes-
ticate themselves by religion, they begin, proceed, and end by
those stages which are investigated here in Book Two, to be en-
countered again in Book Four, where we shall treat of the course
the nations run […]» (§ 393). Toward the end of Book II, we
come across another explicit proleptic reference to the title of
Book IV, viz., «the uniform course run by all the nations» (§
737). And at various places in Book II, the next stage of theoret-
ical grasp of the course of civilization, once the groundwork has
been laid, is adumbrated, as in the central case of language; rather