Giambattista Vico and Understanding Greek Literature and Philosophy – Discourses on Minerva

The little-known Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico is incredibly important for a proper framework to understanding the Greek classics: sublime violence before love and rationality is where civilization begins.

To quote from Vico’s New Science to illustrate the point, he says:

As the first wisdom of the pagan world, poetic wisdom must have begun with a metaphysics which, unlike the rational and abstract metaphysics of today’s scholars, sprang from the sense and imagination of the first people. For they lacked the power of reason, and were entirely guided by their vigorous sensations and vivid imaginations … Great poetry has three tasks: (1) to invent sublime myths; (2) to excite to ecstasy; (3) to teach the masses to act virtuously.

Accepting sublime violence as the starting point of human thinking and the origin of civilization, Hesiod’s Theogony reflects the old cosmos of the Greeks: cruel, dark, and violent. It is governed by lust and destruction. Just read the poem to understand this. It is praise poem to the violent power of Zeus, who ultimately ascends to the throne of the universe by overthrowing his father, Kronos, who, in turn, had overthrown his father, Uranus, by cutting off his phallus with a sickle. The entire poem articulates the vision of that sublime metaphysics of violence and raw power.

Homer, Hesiod’s great rival, begins the transformation to what Vico calls “poetic metaphysics.” Homer’s cosmos still has the violent gods, but his heroes are humans. Their heroic actions are found in love rather than violence (Achilles, Patroclus, Priam, Hector, and so forth). You have Hector comforting his crying infant son, Astyanax, on the walls of Troy. You have Patroclus healing his wounded comrade Eurypylus. You have Priam braving enemy lines and entering the tent of Achilles because of his love for Hector. You have, at long last, the embrace of Priam – an enemy – by Achilles at the climax of the poem when Achilles embraces Priam, lifts him up, forgives him, and returns the body of Hector and bestows a temporary peace so the Trojans “can bury Hector, tamer of horses.” All of these truly heroic moments are moments of comforting love, a love nonetheless, still rooted in pathology.

The Homer of the Odyssey continues the evolution of the Homeric cosmos with Odysseus. Wily as he is, the Odyssey marries cunning with compassion, rationality with love, to bring our hero home to his family. Odysseus is a calculating man, evidence of his growth in rationality and the growing human consciousness toward the reality of rationality in the world, but his rationality serves his pathological desire to reunite with his family and homeland he has been deprived of since venturing off to fight in the Trojan War. Reason serves pathology in the Odyssey.

Homer’s poetic metaphysics displaces Hesiod’s sublime metaphysics, the cosmos of love triumphs over the cosmos of violence. Both are still, as mentioned, pathological realities – but the emergence of rationality is beginning (as seen in the Odyssey). This story reaches its apex in Aeschylus and the Oresteia. The Oresteia deals with the reasonableness of actions taken out of love – the love of Orestes – thereby bringing him to the court of Apollo and Athena where the gods adjudicate in favor of Orestes, thereby asserting a reasonableness to his pathological actions.

The Greek tragedians are wrestling with the ramification of the post-Homeric world, a cosmos of hope found in love, wherein rationality and justice can be found, but find this world shattered by the monumental injustices of The Persian War and eventually the Peloponnesian War. Where is the cosmic justice in these terrible conflicts?

With the Homeric cosmos in decline, the Greek poets turn their attention to dike: to justice. The poets, in dramatic form, lay the seeds for the eventual rise of philosophy in turning to the seminal question of justice amid the hardship of war.

Sophoclean justice is premised on the family. Euripidean justice is rooted in compassion and pity. I treated these notions in more detail in my 90-minute lecture on the meaning of Greek Drama, heavily influenced by this basic theoretical framework offered by Vico. In this turn toward questions of justice, the poetic imperative cannot hold. It ultimately fails.

Then comes the birth of satire as the Greek poetic tradition scoffs at the plausibility of the poetic cosmos. Aristophanes is a reactionary, as Leo Strauss points out, seeking a return to the old cosmos of violence while satirizing Athenian hypocrisy. There is no justice and there is no rationality and there is no love as spoken of by the poets. Euripides is wrong. Sophocles is wrong. Aeschylus is wrong. Homer is wrong. The birth of satire represents a form of extreme skepticism which, paradoxically, also represents the divorce of pathology from rationality which permits for the eventual emergence of a new rationality: philosophy.

At this moment, the Greek literary tradition proves itself incapable of providing a stable metaphysics for understanding our place in the cosmos. The eclipse of the Greek literary tradition leaves the cosmos in ruin—until Plato shows up.

Plato, who wanted to be a dramatist, takes up the challenge of dealing with the question of the Divine, cosmos, and man. Philosophy supersedes the failure of poetry (in Plato’s mind), hence Plato’s seeming negativity to the poets. We cannot, with Plato, turn back to the old cosmos and the old gods and the old poets who have failed us. We must progress into the new cosmos born of this skepticism of poetic wisdom and whether the virtue the poets sought to teach was virtue at all.

In Plato, through Vico’s eyes, we achieve the proper birth of metaphysics divorced from sublime poetry. In Plato, a cosmos of ordered justice through reason finally emerges. This is why Plato is a political philosopher, devoted to the concepts of justice and rationality in all of his dialogues – whether The Republic or The Laws or The Euthyphro or The Crito, even The Symposium and The Timaeus, those notions of justice and rationality are embedded in all of Plato’s dialogues.

Platonic and post-Platonic philosophy therefore moves us down the path of rationality, leading to materialism (Epicureanism) and cosmic oneness (Stoicism). Reason triumphs over love. Rationality displaces pathology. Philosophy overcomes poetry. The soul and the intellect take preeminence over the heart and desire.

When Vico writes that “Plato established the fact that human institutions are guided by providence,” he means that Plato established the fact that Reason (because God is Reason) guides human civilization. This is the triumph of philosophy over poetry and why, in the course of history, poetry starts first and philosophy comes after. I would be remiss to point out that a lot of the finer, technical, details of Vico’s work are generally discredited and unaccepted by contemporary scholarship – like his ruminations on Homeric authorship. Nevertheless, this basic framework of the sublime (violent and pathological) metaphysics of poetry giving way, in its failure, to the rational metaphysics of philosophy, really does help the student and reader of the Greek classics understand the development shift and decline of Greek literature as we approach the philosophic age and why Plato and post-Platonic philosophy have such a confrontation approach to poetry.

With Vico’s framework, we ironically realize that this division between literature and philosophy is not as stark as it seems. Instead, it is the outcome of dialectic. Philosophy owes its existence to the supposed failures of poetry and drama to provide us the metaphysics of meaning in the cosmos in which we live. In that supposed failure, philosophy arose to the challenge of rebuilding the cosmos and to offer a new metaphysics of meaning in the cosmos we inhabit. Vico’s framework invites us to consider the intellectual motives and realities, the intellectual dialectic, at play within the Greek literary tradition as it moves toward the eventual birth of philosophy.

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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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