Poetic Wisdom and the Barbarism of Reflection

“What we need is not to abandon reason, but simply to recognize that reason in the last three centuries has worked within a field which is not the whole of experience, that it has mistaken the part for the whole, and imposed arbitrary limits on its own working.”

—L.C. Knights

What is perhaps the most paradoxical pattern in human civilization, which we might call the failure of success, is also the most difficult to understand and for that reason is all the more important to rethink, because success often blinds us when its effects are accumulating all around. For this paradox the Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) invented a memorable name whose meaning he spent much of his life exploring: He called it the “barbarism of reflection,” and he derived its idea from a remarkably rich theory of human history as a vast sequence that courses along in cyclical patterns. The “barbarism of reflection” is one major cycle, whose character remains paradoxical, if not contradictory, and thus some aspects of the strangeness of this barbarism are the concern of this essay, for they involve chaos and terror in our time.

Vico was a Neapolitan rhetorician, philologist, juridical expert and philosopher of science, whose career spanned the late flowering of the Newtonian seventeenth century and the early stages of the encyclopedic Enlightenment. Nominally a Christian Catholic who often wrote that Divine Providence guides and protects the Gentile believer, he was nonetheless a Baconian promoter in science and in a kind of social Darwinism, including the survival of the fittest. A thinker of complex, even contradictory attitudes, in our time he remains notorious as the mythological inspiration of James Joyce’s great cyclical fictions—Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake—but his most original lasting achievement was to shine a bright light on the theory of history, without ever failing to admit obscurities and complications.

In its third edition, published in Naples in 1744, Vico’s book, The New Science, inaugurated a whole array of disciplines of cultural analysis, all of them concerned with modes of cultural change over long periods of time. In The Power of Ideas Isaiah Berlin calls The New Science’s author one of “the boldest innovators in human thought”:

Vico’s achievements are astonishing. He put forward audacious and important ideas about the nature of man and of human society; he attacked current notions of the nature of knowledge, of which he revealed, or at least identified, a central, hitherto undiscussed variety; he virtually invented the idea of culture; his theory of mathematics had to wait until our own century to be recognized as revolutionary; he anticipated the aesthetics of romantics and historicists, and almost transformed the subject; he virtually invented comparative anthropology and the social sciences that this entailed; his notions of language, myth, law, symbolism, and the relation of social to cultural evolution, embodied insights of genius; he first drew that celebrated distinction between the natural sciences and humane studies that has remained a crucial issue ever since. Yet . . . he has remained outside the central tradition.

Vico is remarkable by any standards. Biographically, his was a hard-earned reputation, to be sure, for the intellectual scene in Naples, a city oppressed by foreign imperial claims and by the Inquisition, could hardly favor speculative philosophy of such widely inquiring range. In his poignant, unpretentious, concise Autobiography, he makes his personal struggle eminently clear, for in his quest for a science of societies and their development he was virtually alone.

Nevertheless, from its difficult beginnings The New Science (aided singularly by its appeal to the romantic historian, Jules Michelet) gradually became a major European inspiration for comprehensive theories of the evolution of human society, such as those represented by the fields of sociology, linguistic studies of myth, cultural anthropology, and most broadly the theory of history. Vico is the modern inventor of “the theory of everything,” so popular among scientists today, although he was preceded by many medieval or even renaissance universalists like Sir Walter Ralegh, who attempted histories from the Flood to the early modern period. Composed in an...