First Principles

314 Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters which they treat.

Giambattista Vico Scienza nuvoa (1725)

In his treatment of the history of social institutions, Vico begins with language. Language is the primary, or first principle of sociality. Central to Vico’s theory is the principle that language has poetic logic. It is an attractive hypothesis, which he carefully elaborates:

400 That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all forms of their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in all the forms in which they may be signified. Accordingly, as poetry has been considered by us above as a poetic metaphysics in which the theological poets imagined bodies to be for the most part divine substances, so now that same poetry is considered as poetic logic, by which it signifies them.

In Vico’s schema, the first articulation of language was driven by an imagined belief in divine substance. He continues to assert that “‘Logic’ comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning was fabula, fable, carried over into Italian as favella, speech.” He quickly contrasts this with the synonymy of mythos and fabula—these terms were used interchangeably by the Greeks, but also proposes that the Latin mutus, mute, descends from mythos. Hence, the articulation of logos is of a dual nature, breeding both speech and silence. The bifurcated nature of logos demonstrates a schism between thought and action.

It is fitting that the matter should be so ordered by divine providence in religious times, for it is an eternal property of the religious that they attach more importance to meditation than to speech. Thus the first language in the first mute times of the nations must have begun with signs, whether gestures or physical objects, which had natural relations to the ideas [to be expressed]. For this reason, logos, or word, meant also deed to the Hebrews and thing to the Greeks. (401)

There is a profound contrast between fabula and mythos— fable is assumed to be incredible, whereas for the Greeks, myth is assumed to be “vera narratio, or true speech,” and essentially credible. This distinction is much like the distinction between “fancy” and the “secondary imagination” of Coleridge. Fancy is the combination of elements pre-existent in human consciousness, while the secondary imagination, for Coleridge, was a contact with the divine and its recombination into articulate speech. This connection between “true speech” and the divine was also assumed by William Blake. However, Blake saw the path of history as a perversion of the gift:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity.

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast (MHH 11)

Blake’s contention was that God was inside humans beings, not outside. After articulation, the second formative axis of language is naming. It is in the formation of common names that the problems of society begin. Vico’s project was different from Blake’s—but there is a strange sort of similarity. Blake wanted to strip away the false systems that had grown up around the names, to recover their original significance. Like Blake, Vico saw the procedure of grouping things under common names as an assault on their primary, spiritual nature, but believed it necessary because poetic logic could reclaim the original (both thing and deed) nature of signs.

We nowadays reverse this practice in respect of spiritual things, such as the faculties of the human mind, the passions, the virtues, vices, sciences, and arts; for the most part of ideas we form of them are so many feminine personifications, to which we refer all causes, properties, and effects that severally appertain to them. For when we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form human images of them. (402)

In this process of reclamation, the end result is a human image. The enemy of this human image was, for Vico, metonymy:

Theological poets, unable to make use of the understanding, did the opposite and more sublime thing: they attributed senses and passions, as we saw not long since imaginations shrank and powers of abstraction grew, the personifications were reduced to diminutive signs. Metonymy drew a cloak of learning over the prevailing ignorance of these origins of human institutions, which have remained buried until now.

This is of great interest to me given the genuine innovation of photography: its reproducibility. Photography is metonymic in a way which does not draw a cloak over the essential qualities of proper names. However, in much of the classical theories of language, metonymy is the weakest of the tropes. This emerges from the problems associated with naming, and the systems which evolve from it. Photography always oscillates between the poles of common and proper names. It’s primary articulation is reproducibility, and it resists the process of naming with a vengeance.

However, the formation of common names is essential to the proliferation of any language. Photography’s ability to articulate a common name is asserted and withdrawn across its history.