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Vico’s philosophy is the philosophy of language elevated to the philosophy of signs.
According to Jurgen Trabant, as he established in his work “Vico's New Science of
Ancient Signs”, Vico’s semiotic is elevated to the sematology. Verene wrote in his
introduction to Trabant’s work that “it is correct to comprehend Vico’s philosophy as
philosophy of signs rather than a philosophy of linguistic signs”. Here, one could recall
Ernst Cassirer’s understanding that language is only one among a number of types of
signs or symbolic form.
Vico’s theory of “poetic characters” or “imaginative universals” incorporates not
simply logic of imagination. According to Verene, as he established in “Vico’s
science of imagination”, Vico’s theory of the Imaginative universals is the theory of
images, not of the concept in any traditional sense. Yet, the universal nature of the
poetic characters discovered by Vico, links his project of the new science in some
strict sense of a science that depends on reason. Imaginative universals are not only
these universals inherited in poetic wisdom of human or civil world, but the universals
actually underlying historical and empirical data. Vico’s common mental dictionary
and language is not only a subject of the philosopher new science but it is also used
by Vico as the language through which Vico’s new science is realized.
According to Verene, the master key to the “Phenomenology of Spirit” is Erinnerung
(Recollection). When we translate Erinnerung in English as Recollection, we are losing
the sense of the “inner” – das Innere. Verene specific approach to the Hegel’s work
in understanding Hegel’s imagination, is the term and concept of Erinnerung –
recollection. Verene emphasise that this term is different from the pure psychological
recollection and Hegel uses the Erinnerung in the last paragraph of his work,
employing this term for four times in very short place of the last words of
Phenomenology. According to Verene, Hegel use of Erinnerung is to describe what
the phenomenology of the spirit is. Hegel waits until the last page, and in fact the last
sentence, to give a name of that power of consciousness by which consciousness
can have a speculative knowledge of its own activity. Here Hegel states that the
forms of spirit in their contingency are history and their conceptual organization are
the science of the coming into the appearance of knowing, and that both together
are conceptual history of recollection.
Recollection is the condition of the history and consciousness. Hiding the heart of his
work in the very last sentence, Hegel engraved clearly his message –
“Phenomenology of Spirit” is as Verene called it “a colossus of systematic memory.
The mode of settings that allow the reader to find the access or the master key to the
whole work of Phenomenology only in the last sentence could be compared with
other great work – known as the “work in progress”, James Joyce’s novel Finnegans
Wake.
Joyce style labeled as “stream of consciousness” implements the novel about the
history and consciousness. The last words of the “Finnegans Wake” are “the keys to
given…” The last sentence of the novel is unfinished, as the first sentence of the novel
Borislav G. Dimitrov 94