'The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Maeromor Mournomates!) averging on blight like the mundibanks of Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten, the hen and crusader everintermutuomergent, for later in the century one of that puisne band of factferreters, (then an excivily (out of the custom huts) (retired), (hurt), under the sixtyfives act) in a dressy black modern style and wewere shiny tan burlingtons, (tam, homd and dicky, quopriquos and peajagd) rehearsed it, pippa pointing, with a dignified (copied) bow to a namecousin of the late archdeacon F. X. Preserved Coppinger (a hot fellow in his night, may the mouther of guard have mastic on him!) in a pullwoman of our first transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a dirkandurk heartskewerer if ever to bring bouncing brimmers from marbled eyes. Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers, back to back, buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with intouristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig’s lifetree, our fireleaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness, haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!) whose roots they be asches with lustres of peins'.
- James Joyce, (1882 – 1941), 'Finnegans Wake'
Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes, Cyclops means round-eyed, and disks are round for now we are looking through a porthole-shaped window as if it were a single large eye. In this section of the Wake a collection of te characters are tesifyoing to the guilt or otherwise of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker's alleged misdemeanours in Phoenix Park one of which is an ex-civil-servant out of the Customs House in a dressy black suit and polished tan boots repeated it with much pointing of his own pipe to a cousin of the late archdeacon Francis Xavier Preserved Coppinger as they sat gazing at a tree out of the window of a Pullman coach repeating the evocation: 'Meggeg, m’gay chapjappy fellow, I call our univalse to witness, as sicker as moyliffey eggs is known by our good househalters from yorehunderts of mamooth to be which they commercially are in ahoy high British quarters (conventional!) my guesthouse and cowhaendel credits will immediately stand ohoh open as straight as that neighbouring monument’s fabrication before the hygienic glll'. ('My good chap, I call the universe to witness, as sure as eggs are eggs, my business credit will stand as straight as that monument before the hygienic globe').
Coppinger may well be Cruel Coppinger, a real person though various legends have sprouted up aroud the name a fearsome Dane shipwrecked off the coast of Cornwall subsequently going on to lead a feared band of smugglers and smugglers. This Coppinger was certainly a certifiably hot fellow, a Viking or Viking type who seized part of the Cornish coast and was usually represented as carrying a whip. You can read about him in Charles Dickens', (1812 – 1870), 'All the Year Round', Vol. XVI, number 399 (December 15, 1866), pp. 537-40. Although he was married, said to have regularly tied his wife to a bedpost, in fact there was no tradition of multiple children though he was said to have had a deaf-mute son who had no soul, mischievous and cruel one day he was discovered laughing at the top of cliff at the base of which was the body of a neighbour's child.
Will you hear of the cruel Coppinger?
He came from foreign kind
He was brought to us by salt water,
But sure he'll be carried away by the wind.
Will you hear a moment of this man
Thrown at us by the storm
From the waves to my fair mothers arms
From wild ocean to tended lawn
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
She carried him to her family's home
And tended to him, but oh
he spat and cursed at his fortune
finding no word to say cept 'no'
He dressed himself in heirlooms
Took a place before the fire
Sat at the head of the table
As the landlord and the squire
Sat atop the seat of power
His mandate now complete
He took the good and worthy
And wiped them on his feet
He stocked and archived labour
He hoarded up the fruits
He watched the branches wither
While he cut through the roots
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
And when the gentry and the clergymen
Come round a visiting
They'll take a slice of his pie
But they won't question a bloody thing
Leaving with rooks beak and feathers
And a bitter tasting mouth
A cat's skin and head in their pocket
As they scuttle off back south
He'd put lock on every gate
And toll on every bridle path
He'd double every rent
Cut the living wage in half
Will he stop at nothing
Will nothing stop his laugh
Oh, Mama, put your man to rights
Or drown him in his bath
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
I repeat this story every day,
But they say my voice is mute
I have lived this moment a thousand times
With the lie I can't refute
I holler warning but they don't hear
I try to sing but to no avail
And weep into the silence
When I see his black ship sail
To drag a harvest to the manacles
Another crop of good men
To grasp at once for reflected stars
Before getting dragged down again
Just to sell off the family silver
When it's washed up on the beach
Is nothing here worth saving?
Is nothing beyond his reach?
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
So, fine people of the mainland
Listen to my plea
When some tory rocks up on your coast
Pray remember me
Consider whether hell
Has any virtue that they lack
As you kick the f***s in the ae and
Send the f*****s back
Do the right thing, mama, do the right thing for you
Do the right thing for heaven's sake
It's the right thing to do
[Note: tory = outlaw, highwayman (how appropriate considering the present UK Conservative party) probably from Irish toraidhe; tóir = pursue).
'Self-portrait with Monocle', 1776, Anna Dorothea Therbusch
I left the last article in this series hanging with a reference to Giambattista Vico's, (1688 - 1744), imaginary universals, created through the repeated imitation of an event whereby words are merely the associated sound that goes with that imitation. The first words uttered by early humans were actually rituals that served as metaphors for events. Homer, (fl. late 8th cent. BC), is an imaginative universal for the Greek people themselves. In the Viconian age of heroes the customs of the people were savage and unreasonable and given such a state of human nature the poetry of Homer cannot be the esoteric or creative act of a single individual.
The alleged hero of the 'Odyssey' certainly puts me in mind of Cruel Coppinger, and Homer, whoever he/they might have been, blithely and matter-of-factly reports upon the rapine and plunder of Odysseus's piratical band as they make their odyssey across the tempestuous Aegean sea their adventures having about them an air of the routine, and apart from the Oxen of the Sun whose killing was proscribed by divine decree there is suggestion of disapproval by the poem's author (s) who apparently regards theft and the killing of foreign peoples to be little more than a sign of its hero's prowess. Vico may have a point.
What of my sailing, then, from Troy?
What of those years of rough adventure, weathered under Zeus?
The wind that carried west from Ilion
brought me to Ismaros, on the far shore,
a strongpoint on the coast of the Kikonês.
I stormed that place and killed the men who fought.
Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,
to make division, equal shares to all.
- 'The Odyssey'
The 'Odyssey' oozes with a imperialist stance the principal one having to do with the proper manners of guests and hosts in nobiliary culture for instance the barbarous and the foreign for Homer have to do with transgressions of etiquette in the eating of food, with those who are rivals in matters of trade, and significantly as in the Cyclops story with agriculture as opposed to pastoralism. The Cyclops is evil in virtue of being a bad host, he is crude, he keeps an uncomfortable house, he cannot converse, he lives a solitary life, and he is detestable because he is a shepherd rather than a farmer like the lords of Ithaca. Homer like Vico grants a higher value to the very caste that is reviled by the Bible which favours shepherds over farmers but embodies the same mobility and shifting sense of home as the nomad since this lord of an agricultural estate arrives in his proper place only at the point where the story breaks off. And when the Cyclops asks the Achaeans:
'Who are you? And where from?
What brings you here by sea ways—a fair traffic?
Or are you wandering rogues, who cast your lives
like dice, and ravage other folk by sea?'
- 'The Odyssey'
he is justified in suspecting the pirates of ill intent given that they had just been eyeing up his 'drying rack that sagged with cheeses, pens / crowded with lambs and kids ... and vessels filled with whey'. War is a craft and Odysseus declares: 'Carnage suited me' throughout the poem’s ports of call, Egypt, Phoenicia, Libya.
An age of heroes indeed.
Each Viconian age is characterised by particular figures of speech. In the divine age the giganti rely upon metaphor to compare and comprehend natural phenomena while in the heroic age blighted by a barbarism of sense metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal and monarchical institutions embodied by idealized figures. The human age blighted by a barbarism of reflection is characterised by democracy and reflection through irony and the rise of rationality once more puts everything back on a descent to the poetic era. An ideal eternal history, the rise and fall of civilizations.
'Irony', contends Vico, 'is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth'. He is quick to point out at the very opening of his Autobiography that he 'take[s] no pleasure in verbal cleverness or falsehood', which he says lacks 'depth', and would rather aspire to the 'candour proper to a historian'. In his 'Art of Rhetoric' (Institutiones Oratoriae), he is more dispassionate, by contrast, but not out of line with these convictions, writing simply that irony in Latin was called dissimulatio or illusio. It is the trope by which we say that which is other than what we feel'. We can get a grasp on Vico's way of thinking by dwelling for a minute on this compendious handbook that dedicates a chapter to 'false tropes'. Tropes are those figures of speech which turn a word from its proper and native meaning to an improper and strange one which Terence in Latin calls the inversion of words (verba inversa) and there appear to be two causes of such mutation, necessity and ornamentation.
Vico does not specify what a necessity may be although the pejorative false when counter-posed to proper and native is made more potent upon observing how he applies instances from antiquity to illustrate the present. Vico connects modern irony with the cannibalism of the Cyclops (I neglected to mention their cannibalism) or one-eyed Polyphemus as a form of reflective consciousness, irony is a one-eyed, illusory, and violent perspective on one's own presumed intellectual superiority and yet under the cloak of satire it is somewhat recuperated by his related discussion on the tropes antilogy (a contradiction in terms or ideas) and antiphrasis (rhetorical device of saying the opposite of what is actually meant in such a way that it is obvious what the true intention is) which traditionally mean to signify a thing by its opposite, which is to say, a dissimulation is proper when it is necessary but only if its saying the opposite can be understood clearly by readers as a calculated deviation from its native meaning.
'The Eye', ca. 1932/35, René Magritte
Vico's imaginary universals may be contrasted with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's, (1770 – 1831), concrete universals which are abstractions which are manifest in a developing or organised set of instance and having the qualities of both the universal and the particular. A universal whose connotation is so particularised that it denotes one concrete reality especially an organised unity. And as we are concerned with figures of speech a reminder of some before proceeding. Contranym. A Janus word. A word with two opposite meanings,for instance sanction which can mean both a penalty for disobeying a law and official permission or approval for an action. Apology, a statement of contrition or of defence. Heimlich, which not only has positive meanings of homely and comfortable but negative also, secret and scary. For Sigmund Freud, (1856 - 1939), they tell us a lot about how the mind works. 'The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable', he said. 'It is simply disregarded. 'No' seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary'.
Condensation. One of the ways by which the repressed returns in hidden ways, in dreams multiple dream thoughts are frequently combined or amalgamate into a single element of the manifest dream for instance through symbols whereby a single idea or dream object stands for several associations and ideas. Metalepsis, a figure of speech in which a word or phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context .. a metonymy of a metonymy. Metonym. Substitution of the name of an attribute for the thing meant. The pen is mightier than the sword. And latency, the state of existing while not yet being developed or manifest, concealment.
For instance through the hearth fire to the collectivised skull of dead ancestors who ruled from below the ground, and between these antipodal skulls the flame of the hearth ruled over by the goddess Hestia cooked sacrificial offerings and also fed the dead. The first altars were used to measure the precise movements of sun, moon, and stars, but because divination was central to the collection and preservation of knowledge based upon these observations the eyes were also libraries, hospitals, and political centres, and in virtue of the dead being honoured at the hearth the underworld supplied divination results as well in the form of latent or secret signifiers different from the signs of the sky. The sky spoke in images and similarities. The underworld spoke in riddles. The first form was representational, the second was self-referential and joke-like. Once established an altar could not be moved. The Cyclops imagined that their altars were ficed to the literal soil and unique location beneath a specific point of the sky and moving would have brought bad luck spirits who resided in the hearth and anyone efecting to another family's hearth would have caused disaster. These beliefs were summarised by thestory of Prometheus who was chained to a rock while an Eagle, a personification of Jove, plucked out his liver, the favourite organ for divination. Such was Vico's major discovery. What was it precisely? Metaphor, thus far its effects have been desribed but not its causes.
Prometheus was the subject of a parable by Franz Kafka, (1883 - 1924), which may shed some light on the issue:
'There are four legends concerning Prometheus:
According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, the gods forgotten, the eagles, he himself forgotten.
According to the fourth, every one grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. - The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable'.
- 'Prometheus'
Hesztia A 'Szem'. Kerítésfestés (Felállítás 2014. szeptember 17., Hegedűs Márton) Hesztia a görög mitológiában a családi tűzhely, a családi élet védőistennője. Az ő hatalmas szempárja néz ránk a 20 nm-es csempéből kirakott mozaikon. - Budapest VII. kerület, Dob utga cc. 38. (Hestia The 'Eye'. Fence Painting (Installation September 17, 2014, Márton Hegedűs) In Greek mythology, Hestia is the patron goddess of the family hearth and family life. Her huge pair of eyes look at us on the mosaic made of 20 square meters of tiles. - Budapest, VII. district, Dob street approx. 38).
Vico is in this case the founder of modern psychology or rather psychoanalysis albeit the differences are a mite complicated but the point is that Vico contended that pre-humans became real humans because they took their own nature that was fierce and crude and projected it as the quality of an object, in this case the sky. And projection occurs every day. We constantly consider ourselves as greedy and conniving but rather than realising our own nature we instead think of others as greedy and conniving and prepare to defend ourselves. Projection and transference are basic psychology and it is human nature to not be able to see ourselves other than when we are reflected in other people and Vico was attune to this on the pop psychology level but the difference is that he figured out how it happened when pre-humans had not yet acquired the ability to think metaphorically.
Against the background of being able to signify while not being able to metaphorize Vico realized the tremendous impact of this turn. With metaphor we know less about the world, we have less mastery of it through our signifying systems but we gain a virtual space in virtual time that has an infinite wealth of potential meaning. The first humans went from meanings, one to one names for things and processes, to meaningfulness, a capability to make use of large chunks of virtual knowledge.
Things that we know that we don't know but more significantly things that we don't know that we don't know, and this goes by a special name, kenosis, emptying oneself and not in the sense of evacuating one's bowels, although it does have a theological meaning (the 'self-emptying' of Jesus', ( c. 4 BC - AD 30 or 33), own will and becoming entirely receptive to God's, (∞ - ∞), divine will): 'But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men', ('Philippians' 2:7, King James version, other translations have 'emptied himself'). A way of knowing without knowing, and what this means is that when we try to express ourselves we always fall short of the right words. The other side of the coin is that whenever we open our mouths we say more than we think we are saying, things that we are deaf to but that other people hear at once. And add the idea thatit is critical to metaphorical thinking, that it is self-developing.
Without humans having to know anything about the virtual divine the virtual divine developed by itself, it had a peculiar autonomy that was self-generative and this meant that although humans would be forbidden to shape or change the virtual divine worlds those worlds would change themselves, they would evolve new forms, new characters, new kinds of actions, thinking andexisting. Myths began with characters with supernatural powers, it then evolved Gods with shortcomings. Gradually hero like figures came on the scene and then human and divine composite heroes able to bridge between human adnd divine worlds. The heroes of mythology were permitted to visit Hades and return alive. The hero acquired a kind of immortality. And finally, fully modern humans would require a world built around single ideas and hierarchical relationships, for logical principles as well as deities have to be single. And we can now perceive how Vico's three ages are about the process of condensation from the multiple to the one, the self-evolving nature of this virtual divine ended so Vico contends with a fully human model, a third age following the ages of gods and heroes.
'Vesta, [Hestia], goddess of divine ceremonies among the Romans, for the lands ploughed at that time were the first altars of the world (as we shall see in the Poetic Geography). Here the goddess Vesta, armed with a fierce religion, watched over fire and spelt, which was the grain of the ancient Romans. Hence too among the Romans nuptials were celebrated aqua et igni, 'with water and fire', and also with spelt (far), and were then called nuptiae confateatae. This ceremony was later confined to priests, for the first families had been all of priests (as has been found to be the case in the kingdoms of the bonzes in the East Indies). And water, fire and spelt were the elements used in the Roman divine ceremonies. On these first lands Vesta sacrificed to Jove [the impious practicers] of the infamous sharing [of women and things], who violated the first altars (which we have said above were the first fields of grain, as we shall explain later). These were the first hostiae, the first victims of the gentile religions. Plautus called them Saturni hostiae, 'Saturn's victims' ... and they were called victimae from victi, as being weak because alone (the Latin victus has preserved this meaning of weakness), and they were called hostes because such impious men were rightly held to be enemies of the whole human race. And among the Romans it remained the custom to cover with spelt the brow and the horns of sacrificial victims. From the name of Vesta the Romans called Vestal virgins those who guarded the eternal fire, which if extinguished by mishap had to be relighted from the sun, for from the sun ... Prometheus stole the first fire and brought it to the Greeks on earth, who therewith set fire to the forests and began to cultivate the land. On this account Vesta is the goddess of divine ceremonies among the Romans, for the first colere or cultivating in the world of the gentiles was the cultivation of the land, and the first cult was raising these altars, setting this first fire to them, and sacrificing upon them the impious men of whom we have just spoken. In this way the boundaries of the fields were fixed and maintained'.
- 'The Poetic Wisdom', in 'The New Science'
'Opfer für die Göttin Vesta' ('Offerings to the Hoddes Vesta') (Hestia's Roman equivalent), 1723, Sebastiano Ricci. 'Nor do the works of Aphrodite delight the revered maiden Hestia, whom Cronus, crooked of counsel, begat (as) his first (child) and, by the design of aegis-bearing Zeus, the youngest too, that queenly (lady), whom (both) Poseidon and Apollo sought to wed; and she swore a great oath, which she delivered (while) touching the head of father Zeus the aegis-bearer, that she, the most divine of goddesses, would be a maiden all her days. So, father Zeus gave her a fine gift of honour instead of marriage, and she sat down in the centre of the house and took the choicest part (i.e. Hestia was the guardian of the hearth). She is honoured in all the temples of the gods, and among all mortals she has been made chief of the goddesses'. - 'Fifth Homeric Hymn'.
Putting to one side any explanations the origins of either Vico's or Hegel's thoughts on history it is possible in presenting an account of Vico's position to concentrate upon certain features in which it resembles Hegel's without necessarily committing the sin of conceptual anachronism and this will deliver a basis for investigating certain radical differences in their approach to what is in essence an equivalent problem. Vico shares with both Hegel and David Hume, (1711 - 1776), the desire to put forward what the latter called a 'compleat system of the sciences', for Hume's admiration for the success of the natural sciences led him to believe that this required showing how a methodology derived from the natural sciences could be made appropriate for understanding all forms of knowledge whatsoever, including, therefore, historical knowledge. On the other hand, Hegel's emphasis upon the concrete, internally related nature of reality led him to view natural science as a partial and abstract way of regarding the world so that the task of philosophy became that of proposing a system of thought whereby we could go beyond science, with its external and abstract view of the world, and see reality in its concrete individuality. A propos this difference between them, Vico is very much nearer to Hegel than to Hume for it is a principal point in his later philosophy that he thinks that the natural world can never be made fully comprehensible whereas the world of human history and of the history of human thought can be (because we made it). But there is an evident difference between the claims that natural science should be superseded because it is too abstract and that it should be disregarded because it is only relatively intelligible.
Hegel and Vico concur in thinking that the world of history has a higher epistemological status than that of the natural sciences whereas Hume's view is that, albeit historical knowledge is in practice more difficult to secure than that of the physical world, because of our inability to set up the experimental conditions to establish the relevant uniformities, it is in principle of the same standing. And further, both Vico and Hegel adopted a holistic view of the character of an historical society. In Hegel's case this was largely restricted to those societies through which reason had developed itself, and it was exploited mainly in terms of the way in which the idea of freedom, at any specific phase in its career, grounded the governing conceptions in any of the main areas in which it particularised itself. A particular instance of this is given in the claim that different determinate forms of the state are founded upon and have emerged fro' the different determinate forms of religion which are themselves expressions of different conceptions of the relation of the particular and the universal.
Given Hegel's evident insistence upon the satisfaction of self-interest as the legitimate right of every individual such a state can be attained only after a very considerable transformation of the individual, of his or her conception of individuality and of his or her understanding of his or her relationship to the state, and it is for this transformation that the spiritual determinants which Hegel contends are too fundamental to be a means are necessary, for these are the areas of the inner life of the nation in which the process of spirit's self-development occurs as it works itself towards its end:
'We must now consider more closely the further determination of national spirit, its internal differentiation, and the essentially necessary phenomena in which the spirit appears as self-activating and self-determining: for these are the qualities which make it what it is. When we speak of a nation, we must analyse those powers in which the spirit particularises itself. These powers are religion, the constitution, the system of justice (including civil right), industry, trade, arts and science, and the military world, the world of valour, by which one nation is distinguished from the other ... All the features which stand out in the history of a nation are intimately connected with one another. The history of a nation consists solely of that process whereby the nation impresses on all the spheres of its activity the spirit's concept of its own nature. In other words, the state, religion, art, the system of justice, and the relation of the nation to other nations - all of these are aspects in which the spirit's concept of itself is realised, in which the spirit contrives to perceive itself and to know itself as an existent world, and to have itself as its own object'.
- 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
Hegel declines to designate morality, religion, art, the constitution and so on, that is to say, the 'spiritual determinants', as a mere means because these are the areas in which the transformations of consciousness and will, in which the concrete self-development of Spirit consists, are actually taking place. And it is here that the human being is an end in him or herself because it is in virtue of his or her involvement in these activities that he or she participates in the free self-determination of reason. In the activities proper to these spheres consciousness and will transform themselves and the crucial point here is that, in a theory in which transformations of consciousness and will play such a central part, it is not sufficient to have an account of some means whereby transformations take place. What is also needed is an account of something concrete which is both capable of being transformed and of providing the ongoing material for further transformations, and Hegel's contention is that it is in the worlds of the spiritual determinants that the material of such transformation is to be found. And furthermore Hegel informs us that it is in these areas of human activity that Spirit's concept of itself is realised, that it contrives to perceive itself and to have itself as its own object. This means that the transformations of Spirit which constitute the heart of the developmental process which philosophical history traces take place primarily in these areas albeit we must be cautious against inferring from this that reason is logically reducible to them. Reason can exist only as embodied in the activities of individuals within these areas of life but it can nonetheless be logically prior to them in the sense that it is a principle which is proper to its development which determines how they develop and not one proper to them which determines how it develops. As Hegel says, explaining why the spiritual determinants cannot be mere means:
'Man is an end in himself only by virtue of that divine principle within him which we have all along referred to as reason (or, in so far as it is internally active and self-determining, as freedom); and ... we may nevertheless assert that religiosity, ethics etc., have their roots and source in this principle and are therefore essentially elevated above external necessity and chance'.
- 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
Hence even if we take the spiritual determinants to be the forms of activity in which Spirit is working out its own development and their historical stages to be the stages of its development we must still recognise that, in so far as they are rooted in it, reason is logically prior to them. For example, and this connects with what we have been saying about Vico above, religion, for this can show how the self-development which occurs in it is at the same time a self-development which is essential for Spirit's final consciousness of its own freedom in a particular form of the state. Religion is one of the most important areas in which Spirit particularises itself and Hegel regards it as so closely connected with the determinate forms of different states that he claims that the latter are founded upon and have emerged from different religions:
'Thus the state and its constitution will correspond to the religion which underlies them,.. so that the Athenian or Roman state, for example, was possible only in conjunction with the specific form of paganism practised by the nations in question, just as a Catholic state will have a different spirit and constitution from a Protestant one.'
- 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
Religion, Hegel contends, is 'the nations' consciousness of its own being and of the highest being ... A nation conceives of God in the same way as it conceives of itself and of its relationship to God, so that its religion is also its conception of itself.' On the other hand, the final end of history is Spirit's consciousness of its own freedom, a condition which requires that the community of individuals wills the state because it affords the conditions of their own freedom,while recognising that it exists only in virtue of their willing it:
'The living reality of the state within its individual members is wha t we call its ethical life. The state and its laws and institutions belong to these individuals .. . All this is their property just as they are its property ...'
- 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
It therefore requires a certain understanding of the relation of the objective to the subjective, but religion is concerned with the various ways in which this can be understood through the relation of the individual to God. It thereby provides an understanding which, in a rational world, must not only be worked out to its rational conclusion, that is to say, the identity of the individual and God, but which includes, as a part of that conclusion, the application of the whole conception to the relationship between the individual and the state.
'In religion .. . the national principle receives its simplest expression and it is on religion that the nation's entire existence is based .. . In this respect, religion is intimately associated with the principle of the state .. . Conscious freedom can only exist when all individual things are recognised as having their positive existence within the divine being and when subjectivity is related to the divine being itself. Thus, the principle of the state, the universe on which its existence depends, is recognised as an absolute, as a determination of the divine being itself'.
- 'Lectures on the Philosophy of History'
'Woman with field glasses' ('Femme à la lorgnette'), 1877, Edgar Degas
Vico holds a similar holistic view which he emphasises via the contention that the history of each nation will in certain circumstances reveal three characteristic phases, the unity of each of which is based upon a certain kind of human nature which expresses itself in the whole cultural and institutional life of the nation at that stage. But how likely is it that the nation should have developed in complete or relatively complete isolation from other nations? Doubtless from a perspective of history Vico's account of the main features which he associates with the history of each nation was inspired by an intensive study of Roman history, in the course of making sense of which he had to draw upon a number of principles. One particular problem which arose was that of explaining a number of striking similarities between Roman culture and institutional life and that of other earlier nations and Vico rejected a widely held view that these could be explained by transmission from some original nation, largely on the grounds that the culture and institutions of a people must conform to their internal characteristics. Accordingly he proposed that these similarities should be regarded as evidence of a single pattern of development which was intrinsic to a nation as such. For later periods of history, where he accepted that there was much international communication, he proposed, but did not develop, further principles to explain the way in which the interaction between nations at different stages of development would affect one another, hence his contention does not depend upon the fact that nations rarely develop in isolation and is therefore not open to refutation by it. Having mentioned the division of the history of each nation into three ages, he writes:
'For, in accordance with this [division], the nations will be seen to have been guided by a constant and uninterrupted order of causes and effects, ever operative within them, through three kinds of nature; from these three natures came three kinds of custom, from which, [in turn], three kinds of the natural law of the gentes were observed and in consequence of which three kinds of civil states or governments were ordered. For the communication of the foregoing three most important kinds of thing among men who had come to human society, three kinds of language and of characters were formed; and for their justification, three kinds of jurisprudence, supported by three kinds of reason [embodied] in as many kinds of judgement, these kinds of jurisprudence being practised in the three sects of times which the nations profess in the whole course of their lives. These special triadic unities, with many others which follow from them, fall under one general unity, that of the worship of a provident divinity, which is the unity of spirit which informs and gives life to this world of nations'.
- 'The New Science'
The third thunder word of 'Finnegans Wake' (it's the clapping one, so in effect I am applauding myself at the end of my article):
khlopat (Russian): clap.
Klatsch (German): applaud.
battere (French): to clap.
greadadh (gradu) (Gaelic): clapping.
'Mountain Landscape with Lightning'. 1675, Francisque Millet
'klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouit happluddyappladdypkonpkot!'
To be continued ...