The Mystery of Creation

...There they instituted the family, practiced religion, invented arts and crafts, ceremonially buried their dead...

...The primeval divine age expressed itself in "mute signs": hieroglyphs, ideograms, auspices...

...Alexander's conquests then spread Greek culture and its theaters throughout the Middle East—Cleopatra spoke Greek—and Hellenism flourished for a thousand years in Byzantium...

...Historical understanding requires fantasia, sympathetic imagination...

...Although men of genius obviously can produce great art, Arieti believes they themselves do not know how they do so, nor can they tell others...

...In 1869, an enthusiastic Jules Michelet claimed, "All the giants of criticism are already contained, with room to spare, in the little pandemonium of the New Science...

...Born in Naples in 1668, son of an impoverished bookseller, Vico was always to feel he had missed the recognition his great learning and originality deserved...

...Further, a high creativity that does justice both to the primary and secondary processes is not, we learn from these two books, largely an individual matter...

...And having created it, man could also change it...

...A dearth of artistic creativity may be ahead...

...In his later years, in fact, he repudiated his best earlier ideas and broke with Goethe, on whom he had been a decisive influence...

...Arieti's "secondary process" thinking, by contrast, deals in public concepts, and is intelligible, ordered, explainable...

...Like Vico, too, Herder gave primary importance to expressiveness, especially in language, and to the intentionality behind all acts...

...New Science had more to do with the making of Finnegan's Wake than the Odyssey had with Ulysses...

...A political conservative and orthodox Christian, Vico tried to believe that his philosophy was fully consistent with God's providence as revealed in Holy Scriptures...

...In Faust, Goethe drew on the malign, almost magical power he sensed in Herder...

...Nevertheless, as a psychiatrist who has treated schizophrenia, he suggests some interesting possibilities...

...The heroic age of Homer, aristocratic and cruel, thought in poetic metaphors...

...In the late democratic age, a product of class struggles, Vico thought that speech would become vulgar or abstract, its medium conventional signs that could be altered at will...

...Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) shared many of Vico's views (some arrived at independently) and had the same problem of inconsistency: He was a Lutheran theologian holding official posts...

...The word "magic" in Arieti's subtitle indicates that rational explanations might always elude us...

...That they could feel guilt Vico simply assumes, as Freud did in Totem and Taboo, an equally free fantasy about the beginning of religion...

...Goethe paid high tribute to New Science without, like so many others, actually having read it...

...Joyceans, most of whom probably haven't pored over his work either, know all about Vico as well...

...How they do this, again, he does not know, despite citing a host of psychological studies of the subject, most of them written by uncreative people...

...Sir Isaiah Berlin was the principal speaker, and his insights are included in a new book, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (Viking, 256 pp., $10.00), developed from essays written in 1957 and 1965...

...Although future Pope Clement XII agreed to sponsor the New Science, he reneged because of its heterodoxy and Vico had to publish a reduced version at his own expense...

...Herder, one of whose books was called Plastik, had an ecstatic, Romantic sense of the body and all of its energies...

...It depends on the existence in a society of a mysterious and confident sense of community, which permits religion and the arts, however anguished, to find their proper voices, but which strict logic can never comprehend...

...This view, however, is contradicted by much in Vico and even more in Herder...

...Warmth...

...True communication would be impossible, and men "though physically thronging together, shall live like wild beasts in solitude of spirit or will...

...Religion establishes communal faith and hope as art cannot do, though art can take strength from it...

...In other words, they developed culture—a second nature, very different from the first...

...But they took thunder to be the voice of God and it terrified them, filled them with guilt...

...Culture was created by man, with no models outside himself...

...Of the mystical power of early poetry, he exclaimed, "What do our modern critics . . . masters of dead learning, know of all this...

...But what Sir Isaiah returns to most often is Vico's contention that we can comprehend history as we cannot understand nature, because man can understand "from within" only what he can make himself—just as the novelist, according to Berlin, "is capable of fully understanding the characters of his novel, or the painter or composer the painting or the song...

...Joyce especially liked Vico's explanation of the modes of communication in different epochs...

...As a result, he was full of contradictions and later admirers exploited them to their own ends...

...Gods are really gods only to those who believe in and worship them as part of a living present...

...But this understanding cannot be arrived at logically, in Cartesian fashion, through a structuring of clear and distinct ideas...

...Men had been little more than beasts, wandering across the face of the earth, coupling promiscuously and publicly, like dogs...

...Waiters & Writing THE MYSTERY OF CREATION BY ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS Giambatista Vico is the great unread innovative genius everyone has been rediscovering since his New Science was first published in 1725...

...For Arieti, the tertiary process that socializes nonrational endocepts is even stronger in religion than in art...

...Last fall, on the 250th anniversary of that event—little noticed in its own time—a five-day high-level international scholarly conference was held in New York...

...Blood...

...No religion is wholly translatable into any other, any more than a language is, especially a language of the past...

...In schizophrenics he has observed a "paleologic primary process...

...As Isaiah Berlin never tires of reminding us, Vico believed that since culture and history are human products, born of conscious will and purpose, we can understand them, even when they are remote in time, as we can never understand nature...

...Heart...

...Life...

...Yet no fourth Greek tragic dramatist ever appeared...

...Expectably, he does stress his two thinkers' opposition to Cartesian or Enlightenment rationalism and to the notion that an ideal state can be founded on logically discoverable principles applicable to all mankind...

...Creative geniuses are as open to endocepts and paleological thinking as schizophrenics, but through mastery of what Arieti calls the "tertiary process," they can combine paleologic and rational logic in an art that seems right and good to their audiences...

...In the final period of confusion—the "second barbarism" before the ricorso—awe, piety and religion would disappear...

...I am...

...This primary process employs "endocepts," inexpressible responses that originate in the depths of the psyche...

...All embody truths totally distinct in kind from those of mathematics and the exact sciences...

...Who had ever seen a god...

...Humanity...

...The materials that imagination can best work with are expressive: myth, language, poetry, laws, customs, rituals...

...What Arieti says about the primacy of religion shows how inconsistent Vico and Herder were in believing that it is possible to penetrate past cultures by acts of imaginative sympathy...

...A more complete edition appeared only in 1744, the year of his death (as well as the birth of Herder...

...According to Vico, it was the sound of thunder that started human history...

...While creativity can draw on a past that it never fully understands, its strengths are the strength of the present...

...Thereafter, Vico was constantly being discovered...

...they make irrational identifications like those of the unconscious, of the early years of childhood, of Herder's magical primitive poetry and Vico's age of divinity...

...Moreover, as mysterious as the origin of creativity is its disappearance...

...Gods are not conscious or controlled creations of men any more than language is...

...The whole of Greek tragedy, for example, was written by three poets in a span of 70 years...

...The frightened men fled into caves that eventually became permanent dwellings...

...But he does find that in recent art the secondary processes have been scanted and weakened, especially in their moral and social aspects...

...It is not clear from Isaiah Berlin's scholarly yet rather repetitious and unfocused text exactly what he wants us to make of Vico and Herder in a period the former would certainly consider a second barbarism...

...By implication, Silvano Aricti's Creativity: The Magic Synthesis (Basic, 448 pp., $15.95), which mentions Vico several times, rejects it totally...

...Words, by connecting passions with things, the present with the past, and by making possible memory and imagination, create family, society, literature, history...

...I feel...

...We can even see in them grand cyclical patterns, the corsi and ricorsi that helped inspire Finnegan's Wake...