138 / 298
Horst Steinke
138
not consider them part of it. The second aspect is the question of their devel-
opment according to Vichian notions of broadly-understood three stages; as
Vico himself implied in both cases, their trajectory of development would be
subjected to the same (spiraling) cycle(s) as other cultural phenomena. It
would therefore not be out-of-place to speak, however infelicitously, of “art-
historical Vichianism”, or “economic Vichianism”, as well as, analogously of
other “Vichianisms”, such as, more recently, “world-historical Vichianism” (as
in Brennan,
Borrowed Light
, cit.), “psychoanalytical Vichianism” (as in L. Gard-
ner,
Rhetorical Investigations: G. B. Vico and C. G. Jung
, London-New York,
Routledge, 2013), “cultural-psychological Vichianism” (as in L. Tuteo,
Giam-
battista Vico and the principles of cultural psychology: A programmatic retrospective
, in
«History of the Human Sciences», 28, 2015, 1, pp. 44-65).
278
In this context, it is of interest to note that there appear to be also oth-
er major subject matters to be absent from Book II, as indicated by M.
Lentzen: «[…] si rimane sorpresi dal fatto che discipline come la medicina e la
giurisprudenza (che Vico affronta però in particolare nel quarto libro della
Sci-
enza nuova
) non vengono prese in considerazione ([…] one is left surprised by
the fact that disciplines such as medicine and jurisprudence (which Vico how-
ever addresses specifically in the fourth book of
Scienza nuova
) are not taken
into consideration)» (Id.,
Il concetto di “sapientia poetica”
negli scritti di Giambattista
Vico
, in
Giambattista Vico e l’enciclopedia dei saperi
, cit., pp. 269-281, p. 270).
279
P. Fabiani,
The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche
, trans.
and ed. by G. Pinton, Florence, Firenze University Press, 2009, p. 111. Simi-
larly A. Fletcher: «In the
New Science
, Vico creates a new paradigm […] envi-
sioning intellectual, political, social, and religious activities and changes occur-
ring within a general
schema
of human creativity. This creativity Vico calls “po-
etry”» (Id.,
On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science
, in «NVS», 4, 1986, pp. 25-
42, pp. 40-41). And in primitive humanity (i.e. humanity at first), such creativi-
ty took the form of highly imaginative language, hence its labelling as “poetic”
by Vico. See A. C. ’t Hart,
La metodologia giuridica vichiana
,
cit., pp. 5-28, p. 22.
280
To borrow a neologism used by N. Struever,
Rhetoric, Modality, Moderni-
ty
, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 48. This crucial
point is developed at length in G. Cacciatore,
Vico: I saperi poetici
, in
Giambat-
tista Vico e l’enciclopedia dei saperi
, cit., pp. 257-267, with the conclusion: «[…] il
sapere poetico è ciò che caratterizza l’originarietà primitiva dell’uomo e non
ancora la sua dispiegata razionalità ([…] poetic thought is that which is char-
acteristic of the originary (primitive) state of man and not yet of its fully mani-
fested rationality)» (p. 266).
281
Book IV, Section V, (§§ 928-931), is a single short paragraph in the
original (G. Vico,
La Scienza nuova. Le tre edizioni,
cit., p. 1172), merely reciting