Horst Steinke, Vico’s Ring. Notes on the“Scienza nuova”, its Structure, and the Hermeneutics of Homer’s Works

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Horst Steinke
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children and those suffering from temporary or permanent
speech impairment303: «Thus the first language […] must have
begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects»304 (§ 401).
And, in a daring theorizing move, Vico turns archaic civiliza-
tion into the “childhood” of human society: «This philological-
philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world’s childhood
(Mondo fanciullo )305 men were by nature sublime poets» (Axiom
XXXVII, § 187). Thus, having argued – standing in a long tradi-
tion from the Renaissance – the originary power of metaphor, he
practiced himself what he advocated. The hallmark of this figura-
tive childhood is its
poetic style, which are vivid representations, images, similes, compari-
sons, metaphors, circumlocutions, phrases explaining things by their
natural properties, descriptions gathered from their minuter or their
more sensible effects, and, finally, emphatic and even superfluous ad-
juncts (§ 456).
Vico goes about methodically, relating literal childhood (and
speech production) to the metaphorical “childhood” that he pos-
tulates as characteristic of people and communities in archaic
times. Point-by-point, he employs psychological-physiological
phenomena heuristically to shed light on the archaic milieu306 . It is
not the intent here to exhaustively trace the parallels proffered by
Vico, except what appears to be a major aspect of Vico’s heuris-
tics, namely iconicity307. Iconicity is the common aspect that char-
acterizes both the very basics of communication, on the one
hand, and the originary cultural effect of language in the archaic
world, on the other hand. Iconicity in the first sense, without
which children would not be able to acquire language ability, is
evidenced by «gestures or physical objects»308 and «mutely point-
ing» (§§ 401-402)309. And iconicity, a proclivity for imagery, is al-
so typical of the language of the first civilization(s), as stated in
§ 456310 . Iconicity is then precisely the original, and originary,
metaphorical language311, but raised to the level of «imaginative