Spring 2010 - Interpretation

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I n t e r p r e t a t i o n
a human artefact could teach man nothing except that he was not it.
We are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that alone.
(Frye 2000, 37)
Frye’s assessment remained unaltered even in his later writings. In “The Double
Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion,” originally composed in 1990,
Frye insists that “the axiom of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico was verum factum: we understand nothing except what we
have made” (Frye 2000, 185)—as if any attempt to understand Vico as a Mind
that we did not “make” were nothing better than an exercise in futility.
Frye’s diagnosis and prognosis stand at the farthest remove
from Vico’s own arguments, entitling us to suspect that Frye’s understanding
of Vico is based on merely indirect acquaintance with the philosopher’s
work. Frye’s account of Vico’s thought appears to rely heavily on English renderings
of Vico’s texts and possibly on twentieth-century appraisals of Vico,
rather than on Vico’s original Italian and Latin texts. Frye does not appear to
be disturbed by the possibility that his representation of Vico betray lack of
intimacy with the philosopher’s own thought. At least in the press, Frye pays
no attention to the possibility that he may have misunderstood Vico, or that
what enabled him to step beyond Vico was lack of an adequate understanding
of what stood before him. Had he doubted his vision, perhaps Frye would
have intended that what stood before him was no molehill, but “the Olympus
of the Mind” that would inevitably make any audacious conqueror stumble
(Oration II, par. 8-9).
That which enabled Frye to appropriate the “letter” of Vico’s
text appears to have been something akin to what one of Vico’s friendly interlocutors
once spoke of as “the tyrannical audaciousness of wrong forgone
conclusions”—a stance that would have prevented Frye from inquiring into
the inherent reason or mind of Vico’s phrasings (see Addendum 1). Ultimately,
Frye’s treatment of Vico is unwittingly reminiscent of the treatment
Vico’s dogmatic barbarian “of reflection” reserves to ancient and thus longdead
philosophical Writers (Scrittori), where he crowns himself as Divine
Author of their world, as if their world were devoid of any original order and
meaning—as if Right were not rooted in nature prior to its being imposed
supernaturally (see Addendum 2).