Giambattista Vico
La Scienza nuova, 1725
“Human beings, their cultures and institutions are endlessly governed by a cyclical and varies rhythm, evolving, through a three-stage process. From barbarism to civil society and back again to barbarism.”
k The Age of Gods constructed the world in a poetic, metaphorical and mythic way
k The Age of Heroes saw itself in a legendary term
k The Age of Humans was found on rationalism
v Imaginative Universal (il universale fantastico)
“Fantasia or imagination, turns out to be ‘a primordial power of mind that makes cognition itself possible . . [a power] upon which the human world or the world of civil things depends both for its origin and its continued existence . . Fantasia is the power to make something true through the shape of the metaphor”
v Myth of Jove, or the primary imaginative universal, is not a traditional metaphor about origin and existence, but it is “the first act of consciousness from which flow all subsequent physical and metaphysical constructions and experience throughout the history of mankind.”