A saving grace
Richard Luckett Vico and Herder Isaiah Berlin (The Hogarth Press £6.00) 'What am I? Or from whence? for that I am, 1 know, because 1 think.' So saying Adam, newly created, rises from his bed of moss and flowers in Dryden's operatic version of Paradise Lost. It is both brilliant and ludicrous: a vastly ingenious solution of the problem necessarily posed by Adam's first words, yet an anachronism effectively disinheriting Europe of everything that antedated the publication of Descartes' Discours in 1637. But there is a way of reading it which reduces the absurdity; for Dryden, by 1670, man was Cartesian, and for Europe at large the Cartesian definitions would be fundamental for at least a hundred years. In the place of the biblical and Miltonic Adam we have the Adam of the Royal Society and the Enlightenment : a rational being, proceeding from first principles universal in their application In Vico and Herder Isaiah Berlin examines two thinkers who rejected the Cartesian formula and, in their rejection, anticipated some of the most important tendencies in the intellectual life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Vico the 'rule and criterion of truth is to have made it'; so Descartes' criterion of truth, the clear and distinct idea that the Mind can have of itself, is useless, since the Mind does not make itself and therefore cannot properly conceive of itself. For Herder there was the assertion 'I feel! lam!' —where in the very absence of a logical connective the whole Cartesian fabric was denied.
The disagreements between Herder and Vico are as important as the resemblances. Both were Christian and it seems clear that, Without their Christianity and the appeal that it allowed them to a world of supernatural and transcendent value, neither could so easily have thrown away the convenient calculus of the Enlightenment. But Vico was a Roman Catholic, Herder a Protestant, and though Herder on occasion expressed a cautious admiration of some of the cohesive aspects of the Roman church he was as far from the sacramental theism that so disconcertingly recurs in Vico, as Vico was distant from Herder's view that the state robs men of themselves'. Vico's La scienza nuova is described by Isaiah Berlin as 'an amalgam of sense and nonsense, an ill-assorted mass of ideas' culled from the 'luxuriant jungle' of his Mind. Herder never attempted any comParably extensive expression of his thought (though Vico's book is only a part of the project he originally contemplated); but equally he never departed from standards of lucidity which, though they, failed to satisfy Kant, have met the approval of sufficiently rigorous judges. The humanity of Herder's writing inspired in Heine a devotion that he felt himself unable to express adequately in cold prose; no such tenderness preserved the awe of Vico's memory. Indeed, Sir Isaiah more than once observes that Vico was not and is not read. But in their common insistence on the multiplicity and incommensurability of values in different cultures, in their emphasis on the imagination as a key to the apprehension of other times and other societies, in their shared sense of the value of the kind of experiences and creations that might superficially be dismissed as primitive, and above all in their notion et' the importance of the part played by language in determining the form of a society, they make up a formidable alliance. It is none the less remarkable because their views were reached independently, at different times and in different places; though Herder eventually read Vico (then long dead), he did so some twenty years after he had formulated his own most distinctive ideas.
Sir Isaiah has a thesis to develop in his account: he is concerned with the role of the imagination in humane learning, with the limitations of the natural sciences, and with the problems of evaluation that must follow from any relativist or pluralist interpretation of human societies. But he allows this to develop by implication, leaving his readers to pursue the connection between Herder, with all his gentle anarchism and his hatred of racialism and imperialism, and those sinister movements that have since attempted to enrol him in their pantheons. Sir Isaiah's primary function is that of expositor, reining in Vico's hard-mouthed, all too fleet Pegasus, and elucidating the nature of Herder's feeling for 'deeply-rooted forms of life' and his identification of populism, expressionism and pluralism as the distinguishing marks of a healthy culture. If there is a difficulty with Sir Isaiah's analysis it is that it becomes too easy, too reasonable; it may refer to, but it cannot adequately reflect, Vico's struggles with his material, or the importance of tone in Herder. As a result we can lose a sense of the tension that exists between the ideas they propound and the background of thought against which, in their original dress, they stand so strongly silhouetted; at the same time, without the benevolently forensic treatment that Vico is accorded, we might not have troubled to trace the outline at all.
Sir Isaiah notes the influence of Vico on Joyce in his `later work'. But it is not evident merely in the cyclical `revicus' or the creating thunder of Finnegans Wake; it informs the whole Homeric conception of Ulysses where the epic adumbrates, as its action runs through the Dublin day, the history of a people and a hybrid (thus comic, not heroic) culture. Where fashionable theories of literature lean most heavily on Joyce they also, unwittingly, depend most on the overworked and impoverished Neapolitan pedagogue. Yet Vico did not call attention to the importance of literature as cultural fact simply in order to initiate further recycling. He was making a claim for the imagination that gave it a significance beyond the `literary' as it was conventionally, understood in his day, or in ours. As a learned Catholic he had already had to face those textual criticisms of scripture that were to trouble German Protestant theologians over half a century later. Herder, with his emphasis on extrarational modes of perception, was caught up in that development of hermeneutics which was eventually to replace the historical incarnation with a God defined as the highest form of metaphor, the ultimate and redeeming product of the poetic imagination. The consequence was a period of exaltation and confusion, which allowed a remarkable blurring of distinctions between religion and philosophy, religion and poetry, religion and aesthetics, and religion and social reform.
That period came, in due course, to an abrupt and disenchanted end, most probably as a consequence of Darwin's demonstration that selection was both a methodological principle and a principle of existence. The imagination became suspect once again, more dangerous than any fundamentalism. The studies it had fostered were invaded by the methods of those sciences which Vico had tried to expose as upstarts. Driven from the houses of learning it lurked and lurks outside, feared but unheeded. It would be better, we seem to assume, if it wore the robes of science: not Vico's new science, but the old science incarnated by Dryden in his Adam. It is not necessarily a step forward.
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