The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

PART I
Fetishism: The Master Trope
So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that
man becomes all things by understanding
them, this imaginative metaphysics shows
that man becomes all things by not understanding
them; and perhaps the latter proposition
is truer than the former, for when man
understands he extends his mind and takes in
the things, but when he does not understand
he makes the things out of himself and becomes
them by transforming himself into
them.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science