See the world with wonder. Unamuno, Life 7.13
Antiquity
imagines the world as something immediate and sensual, while
modernity sees it coldly, abstractly, with no wonder (and
consequently, no deep commitment to life, generally, or humanity,
more specifically). This is an imbalance we need to address, to
correct. Unamuno thinks language may offer a means for correction
here, as it retains some of the old mind that produced it, a mind
that imagined the world with wonder.
Juan
Bautista Vico, con su profunda penetración estética en el alma de
la antigüedad, vió que la filosofía espontánea del hombre era
hacerse regla del universo guiado por istinto
d’animazione.
El lenguaje, necesariamente antropomórfico, mitopeico, engendra el
pensamiento. «La sabiduría poética, que fué la primera sabiduría
de la gentilidad —nos dice en su
Scienza
Nuova—,
debió comenzar por una metafísica no razonada y abstracta, cual es
la de los hoy adoctrinados, sino sentida e imaginada, cual debió ser
la de los primeros hombres ... Esta fué su propia poesía, que les
era una facultad connatural, porque estaban naturalmente provistos de
tales sentidos y tales fantasías, nacida de ignorancia de las
causas, que fué para ellos madre de maravillas en todo, pues
ignorantes de todo, admiraban fuertemente. Tal poesía comenzó
divina en ellos, porque al mismo tiempo que imaginaban las causas de
las cosas, que sentían y admiraban ser dioses ... De tal manera, los
primeros hombres de las naciones gentiles, como niños del naciente
género humano, creaban de sus ideas las cosas ... De esta naturaleza
de cosas humanas quedó la eterna propiedad, explicada con noble
expresión por Tácito al decir no vanamente que los hombres
aterrados fingunt
simul creduntque.»
Y
luego Vico pasa a mostrarnos la era de la razón, no ya la de la
fantasía, esta edad nuestra en que nuestra mente está demasiado
retirada de los sentidos, hasta en el vulgo, «con tantas
abstracciones como están llenas las lenguas», y nos está
«naturalmente negado poder formar la vasta imagen de una tal dama a
que se llama Naturaleza simpatética, pues mientras con la boca se la
llama así, no hay nada de eso en la mente, porque la mente está en
lo falso, en la nada». «Ahora —añade Vico— nos está
naturalmente negado poder entrar en la vasta imaginación de aquellos
primeros hombres.» Mas, ¿es esto cierto? ¿No seguimos viviendo de
las creaciones de su fantasía, encarnadas para siempre en el
lenguaje, con el que pensamos, o más bien el que en nosotros piensa?
Giambattista
Vico (†), with his profound aesthetic insight into the soul of
antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of mankind was to make
itself a rule for the universe, guided by what he called an animating
instinct. Language, necessarily anthropomorphizing and
mythopoetic, engenders thought. “Poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of
cultured folk,” he tells us in his New Science,
“had to begin with a metaphysics that wasn't rational and abstract,
like
the one the learned use today. Instead,
it had to be felt and imagined, as the life and thought of the first
humans … Their thought was its own kind of poetry, a natural
faculty for illustration and association, since they formed
sentiments and fantasies in manifest ignorance of causes. This
ignorance, with its metaphysics, was a universal mother of miracles
for them, for as they were ignorant of everything, their capacity for
wonder waxed great. Poetry thus began in them as something divine,
for they imagined causes for things while feeling that these causes
were gods, and wondering at them … In this way, the first men of
the gentile nations, as children of the rising human race, created
actual
things out of their ideas … From
the natural growth of their human expression we inherit the eternal
legacy that Tacitus expresses nobly when he observes, quite
correctly, that men moved by fear believe what their minds represent
to them” (‡).
Vico
goes on to show us the age of Reason, as opposed to Fantasy or
Imagination. In this age of ours, he says, the mind is so removed
from the feelings, even among the common folk, “whose tongues are
always uttering abstractions,” that we are naturally denied “the
power of making any great image of a lady named Nature, whose
feelings we sense, for though our mouths might utter her name, there
is nothing like her in our minds, which are lost in what is false, in
the nothingness of pure abstraction.” “In our time,” Vico
concludes, “it is naturally impossible to enter into the vast realm
of imagination inhabited by those first peoples.” But is this true?
Are we not still living off the creations of their fantasy, creations
fixed forever in the flesh of our language, which is the tool of our
thought—or perhaps better, the thing that thinks through us?
---
(†)
The famous Renaissance humanist whose Principi di
una Scienza Nuova Intorno alla Natura delle Nazioni per la Quale si
Ritruovano i Principi
di Altro Sistema del Diritto Naturale delle Genti was
first published in 1725.
(‡)
The passage of
Tacitus referred to here
discusses empty
rumors that Drusus Julius
Caesar (8-33
CE), the son of Germanicus
& adopted son of the Roman emperor Tiberius, had escaped prison
to foment a revolt against the latter. Drusum Germanici
filium … quippe elapsum custodiae pergere ad paternos
exercitus, Aegyptum aut Syriam invasurum, fingebant simul
credebantque (Annales
5.10).