"Since, in our time, the only target of our intellectual endeavors is truth, we devote all our efforts to the investigation of physical phenomena, because their nature seems unambiguous; but we fail to inquire into human nature which, because of the freedom of man's will, is difficult to determine. A serious drawback arises from the uncontrasted preponderance of our interest in the natural sciences" (Study Methods... p.33).

Vico and the 'conceits of knowledge'

In our attempts to explain language and mind, Vico warns us against taking it for granted, that how they now seem to be represents how they have always been. As a central methodological axiom in his New Science, he recommends that our "doctrines must take their beginnings from that of the matter of which they treat" (Vico, 1948, para.314). In other words, in our attempts to understand the nature of human mentality, we should try to begin where human mentality begins. Ingold too, in his discussion of an anthropology of persons, suggests that we must begin from a theory of how persons are possible, from what he calls a theory of sociality. Where by "sociality," he says (p.221), "I refer to the generative properties of the relational field within which persons are situated." But what actually is involved in doing this? Where could we find the proper beginnings of such a field, and how should its "generative properties" be characterized? Upon what should we focus our attention? For, as we have seen above, we should guard against formulating our claims yet again as only an 'argumentative position' in a discourse. Such a move disconnects and separates the very features whose interrelations we want to explore. Indeed, it does more, for our current ways of making sense (while undeniably revealing in all kinds of ways), are also concealing too. They both hide from us not only the processes which went into their own production, but also (because of the demand for clarity), the proper character of their beginnings.

Aware of just these difficulties, Vico suggests that we must undertake some prior preparations of ourselves, if we are to overcome them. To recognize the character of the kind of beginning points we need, we must change our attitudes in some way. To this end, Vico discusses two conceits, or borie, to which we as scholars (inexperienced as we are in a knowledge of practical activities) can fall victim:

"On the one hand, the conceit of nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no hope of getting the principles of our Science from the philologians. And on the other hand the conceit of scholars, who will have it that what they know must have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting them from philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world" (para. 330).

- i) First, that we cannot get our beginnings from 'within' a culture (nation); they lie 'outside' at least its normal forms of reality. Within a culture, they will thought to be extraordinary.
- ii) Second, it is not the case that human forms of life were invented by an original nation who then passed on its inventions (its culture) to others.
- iii) But third, that cultures arise 'naturally', so to speak, as a result of the 'providential' nature of (or of the provisions immanent within) social relations.
- iv) Hence fourth, our claim that as trained scholars, we are in a good position to study the problem of the origins of human society, is the opposite of the case. We need to 'undo' a good deal of our training, to see the extraordinary as the source of the ordinary.

This brings us directly to Vico's second boria and his claim that we must reckon as if there were no books in the world, and the extraordinary stance it requires if we are to take it seriously. For, as many writers, such as Goody (1977), Harris (1980, 1981), Luria (1974), Ong (1982) and Vygotsky (1962), for instance, point out, literate peoples, those like us who speak a language which also exists in a written form, experience their knowledge of their language in a wholly different way from oral peoples. But in what way differently? What does it mean to take Vico's maxim seriously? Vygotsky (1962) puts it well when he says that "in learning to write the child must disengage himself from the sensory effect of speech and replace words by images of words" (p.98, my emphasis). It is this sensory or sensuous aspect of speech which is so difficult for us now, as literate people, to recognize and to describe; it is, however, this sensuous aspect of speech which will be our main concern below.

This, then, is the force of Vico's correctives: If we are to grasp the nature of the beginnings of language, and reckon as if there were no books in the world, it is the (for us) extraordinary nature of oral, pre-literate, non-conceptual, non-logical forms of communication that we must understand. We must grasp the nature of a form of communication which consists, not in a sequential occurrence of events or things, not in a series of products or of component meanings, but which 'subsists' in the continuous flow of sensuous, 'moving' activity between people.

Vico and 'sensory topics'

In such an unbroken flow of responsivity, in which at first, as Vico puts it, "each new sensation cancels the last one" (para. 703), how do people manage to create and establish within the flow of experience between them a 'place' (topos), an 'is', within the flux of sensation that can be 'found again'? How is a recognizably distinct, but socially shared feeling about one's circumstances, to which all those involved can later return, formed? For without the possibility of referring to something recognizable as familiar, individuals would live, as Mead (1934, p.351) puts it, "in an undifferentiated now...," responsive like animals only to immediate and proximate influences. How, without the metaphor of written texts, and of meanings as static images (representations) to help us, how might we imagine the nature of people's first mental activity? While modern theories of knowledge begin with something present to the mind - e.g., Descartes begins with self-evidently true, clear, and simple innate ideas - Vico, begins by asking how it is that the mind comes to have anything present to it at all (Verene, 1981).

And it is precisely to this question that Vico claims to have an answer, indeed, it is the master key of his science. "We find," he says,

"that the principle of these origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the early gentile people, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we moderns cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men" (para.34, my emphasis).

In paras.379-391 of the New Science, Vico analyzes what he calls the "civil history" of the saying that it was "From Jove that the muse began." Taking it seriously, he suggests that fear of thunder indeed functioned to give rise to both the first sensory topic and imaginative universal. For, as everyone runs to shelter from the thunder, all in a state of fear, an opportunity exists for them to realize that it is the same thing that they all fear; and a look or a gesture will communicate this. What we might call a 'moment of common reference' exists between them. What the 'inner mechanisms' might be making such a realization possible is not Vico's concern here; his concern here is with the 'outer' social conditions. And here it is the fear shared in common which provides the first fixed reference point which people can 'find again' within themselves and know that others 'feel the same way'.

For this kind of fear, this fear of thunder, is not an ordinary fear of an immediately present dangerous event to with one can respond in an effective manner. There is no immediate practical response available to them in response to thunder. It is "not a fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves" (para.382). Their fear is of a kind which seems to point beyond the thunder. When people hear it, they become confused and disoriented, they move furtively and with concern for each other - the thunder's presence is the unspoken explanation of their actions. And often, "when men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and cannot explain them by analogy," says Vico (axiom, para.180), "they attribute their own nature to them" (see epigraph quote). Thus at this point:

"The first theological poets created the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in the act of hurling the lightening bolt; an image so popular, disturbing and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared, revered and worshipped it in frightful religions... They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove. The science of this language the gentiles believed to be divination..." (para.379).

But the fable of Jove, the imaginary universal, 'lent' form to, and was 'rooted' in, the prior establishing of a sensory topic, a sensuous totality linking thunder, with the shared fears at the limits of one's being, and with recognizing the existence of similar feelings in others because of shared bodily activities. It is created, not out of a heterogeneous amalgam of events, but within a developed and developing totality of relations between people.

"The first founders of humanity applied themselves to a sensory topics, by which they brought together those properties or qualities or relations of individuals and species which were so to speak concrete, and from these created their poetic genera" (para.495).

Sensory topics are the primordial places, the loci, constituting the background basis of the mentality of a people. They make up its common sense, its sensus communis. Without a common sense, there is no basis in which to 'root' the formation of any imaginative universals. Yet, such a common sense is in no way systematic. It is, says Heider (1958, p.2), "unformulated and only vaguely conceived." "It embraces the most heterogeneous kinds of knowledge in a very incoherent and confused state," says Schutz (1964, p.72). It is "immethodical," says Geertz (1983, p.90), i.e., it caters both to the inconsistencies and diversity of life, it is "shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. It comes in epigrams, proverbs, obiter dicta, jokes, anecdotes contes morals - a clatter of gnomic utterances - not in formalized doctrines, axiomatized theories, or architectonic dogmas." Yet strangely, as Geertz goes on to say, for all its disorder, such knowledge has "accessibleness" as another of its major qualities. Indeed, as Vico points out, it is first in practical activities that people must create (by ingenuity/ingengno) the meaningful links between i) 'what' is demanded in a situation, and ii) 'what' is available (by way of resources)⁽¹⁾ - a meaning must be 'lent' to the sensing of one's surroundings.

What Vico outlines above then, is a poetic image in terms of which one might understand the mute, extraordinary, common sense basis for an articulate language - where such a basis constitutes the unsystematized, primordial contents of the human mind, its basic paradigms or prototypes. And as Wittgenstein (1953) says about the functioning of such a paradigm or prototype:

"In the language-game it is not something that is represented, but it is a means of representation ...something with which comparison is made" (no.50).

Recapitulation and conclusions:

Current theories fail (doubly): either properly to represent the phenomenon of life, or, the living origins of their own formation as discourses. Differences can give rise to distinct representations only within already existing discourses, they thus fail also to account for the relations which link discourses together within a unity as intelligible responses to each other. Because of these difficulties, we turned to certain positive and negative methodological maxims offered by Vico. In line with his positive maxim, that "doctrines must take their beginnings from that of the matter of which they treat," we turned to a study of what he called 'sensory topics', the 'places' within the flow of sensuous awareness we have in the living of our own lives to which we can return and re-feel (sense, intuit) a past circumstance. However, the negative maxims recommended by Vico (the two 'conceits') alerted us to the fact that such entities could not be represented within a discourse (any discourse). They are extraordinary entities, 'outside' of the common sense of any nation or culture.

This may tempt us to say that they exist in an extra-linguistic reality, outside of all socio-historical circumstances. Such a reality may by extra-linguistic, but it is in no sense an extra-relational reality. Its socio-historical character stretches back to the beginnings of (our) times. For us, the set of sensory topics, the loci of continuously novel activities in which our linguistic realities are 'rooted', are dynamically sustained and reproduced now in our daily social activities. Following Prigogine, it is at the boundaries between flows of different activity that they are created. They 'subsist' in the "bustle," or "hurly-burly" (Wittgenstein's terms: 1980, II, nos.624-9) of everyday social life, as continuous unforeseeable or contingent sources of originality, changing (but retaining their identity) as their surroundings change. They are the origins or 'seeds' from which acts or utterances belonging to a social group can be fashioned⁽²⁾.

To apply such knowledge practically, or to give it linguistic form, further metaphorical activity is required: For Vico, this is the primary operation productive of the different, distinctive forms of human mentality - hence his claim that early peoples were poets who spoke in poetic characters. Where the root sense of metaphor here is in the activity of 'carrying over, or transferring something,' from the Greek metapherein. In practical affairs, this means a 'giving' or a 'lending' of significance to sensory perception, a 'bridging' of the gap between human beings and their circumstances. Language in such a view as this ceases to be a neutral medium for the representation of, and reference to, events and things somehow already grasped as such non-linguistically; it characterizes language as being constitutive or formative of what it represents. It involves tropes, figurative and formative ways of communicating and speaking, at every level. It is everywhere rhetorical in the sense that in their contingency, sensory topics are 'given' or 'lent' a determinate form one way or another within different forms of talk. Hence my claim above, that we need not only a poetics but also a rhetoric of relationships, where a rhetoric is concerned with the giving of a first linguistic form to the feelings found again in topics. But here, our concern has been just with beginnings.

So, to repeat our formulation again: as sources of continuous unforeseeable originality, sensory topics constitute the beginnings from which people, between them, can fashion a society. But to characterize them in a way which captures their nature, as it might have been for the first peoples, we have had like them to resort to a poetic approach.

Note:

1. 1. Vico saw also the conceit of scholars as due to their detachment from the necessities of life. Indeed, in his history, they came last on the tree of knowledge: "First [were] the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers: this is the order of all progress from the first origins" (Vico, 1948, para.22).

2. 2. See Billig et al (1988) for a discussion of such 'topics' as sources of discussion and argument.