- Recovery and rehabilitation of the Humanist tradition, particularly Renaissance (Italian) Humanism and Vico
- What is Humanism?
- A belief that the real world is experienced materially through the senses and passions, not through isolated rational thought
- A belief that the world changes and we must meet it through ingenium
- This stance implicitly invokes sophistic notions of kairos and mētis
- A belief in the need to be rooted in practical human concerns
- An assertion that the basis of humanity is not rationality or logic but language and ingenium
- An alternative to the scientific paradigm
- non-rational work such as history, myth, and literature are valid ways of knowing
- we encounter the world through symbolic language
- Who was Vico?
- He lived at the end of the Renaissance Humanist period and may be seen as the cumulation of it
- His work opposes the rationalism endorsed by Descartes because it neglects any recognition of situational context
- He believes Descartes's thought is unnatural, because we experience existence through individual interactions with the "real" material world, not through abstract intellectual pontification about first principles
- He parses human development into three phases:
- cultural age = humans as animals part of the natural world
- age of heroes = humans and imagined superhuman benefactors (like the Greek pantheon(
- age of humanity = humans as creatures able to control nature without need of supernatural assistance
- He puts ingenium or ingenuity at the center of his thought
- This is the capacity to find similarities among objects and experiences
- At odds with people in the logical, rational, scientific tradition, which holds that objective knowledge exists, is preferable to subjectivity, and is knowable through reason
- He conflicted with the then dominant German Idealist philosophy (from folks including Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger)
- He rejected the rational reductionism of Decartes's cogito argument ("I think, therefore I am")
- His thought is implicitly against Platonic absolutism
- He had issues with the scientific paradigm
- The scientific paradigm seeks to discover first principles, yet it necessarily cannot validate the source of those principles
- The scientific paradigm is concerned with universal truths and cannot account for the individual nature of different situations
- The scientific paradigm rejects (as it must) anything that is not grounded in its own logical principles
- The scientific paradigm is thus inherently limited and only one tool for comprehending the world
- His philosophical/rhetorical system:
- Humans encounter situations in the world which require response
- The world is thus experienced concretely, passionately, and materially through the sense—not rationally through the intellect
- Ingenium (ingenuity) is how humans meet the demands of the world
- Ingenium manifests in three primary places:
- imagination = the connection of experience with symbols (thus separating us from animals)
- work = imposing meaning on the natural world
- language = the specific choice of symbology and how this changes
- Metaphor is a really big deal
- Metaphor operationalizes ingenium because it allows us to connect the experience of the senses with the human world of language
- Metaphor is the basic process of language: giving symbols to sensory items and experiences
- Folly is the ability to use language (including internal language) to imagine different possibilities
- Rhetorical language is immediate to the situation, metaphorical, and operational
- Rational language is universal, deductive, demonstrative, and only functional within a closed system
- Rhetorical language is primary; rational language and thus rationality are built upon rhetorical language
Comments: - Do we really have to reject everything non-rational to work under the scientific paradigm?
- It seems true that we can't be objective; even matters of selection are interested
- I don't buy that science is sealed off
- Maybe we use language under the scientific paradigm as a tool to disseminate knowledge
- What's the difference between folly and insanity?
|
|