The German title of the film is: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle; lit. Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The film is a 1974 West German drama written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Bruno Schleinstein (credited as Bruno S.) and Walter Ladengast. The film closely follows the real story of foundling Kaspar Hauser, using the text of actual letters found with Hauser.
The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man, wearing a black overcoat and top hat, who feeds him.
One day, in 1828, the same man takes Hauser out of his cell, teaches him a few phrases, and how to walk, before leaving him in the town of Nuremberg. Hauser becomes the subject of much curiosity, and is exhibited in a circus before being rescued by Professor Georg Friedrich Daumer, who patiently attempts to transform him.
Hauser soon learns to read and write, and develops unorthodox approaches to logic and religion; but music is what pleases him most. He attracts the attention of academics, clergy and nobility. He is then physically attacked by the same unknown man who brought him to Nuremberg. The attack leaves him unconscious with a bleeding head. He recovers, but is again mysteriously attacked; this time, stabbed in the chest.
Hauser rests in bed describing visions he has had of nomadic Berbers in the Sahara Desert, and then dies. An autopsy reveals an enlarged liver and cerebellum.
Logician: Let’s pretend that this is a village. In this village live people who tell only the truth. Here is another village. The people here only tell lies. Two paths run from these villages to where you are standing and you are at the crossroads. A man comes along, and you want to know which village he comes from the village of the truth-tellers or the village of the liars. Now in order to solve this problem, to solve it logically you have one question, and only one. What is the question?
Nurse: That’s too difficult for him, how can he know that.
Logician: I admit, the question is thorny. If you ask the man whether he comes from the village of truth and he does, then he will say, truthfully, yes. But if he comes from the village of lies, he will lie and also answer yes! Yet there exists one question which will solve the problem.
Nurse: That’s much too hard, too complicated.
Logician: You have one question, Kaspar and only one, to solve this problem of logic.
Nurse: I wouldn’t know either.
Logician: lf you can’t think of the question then I shall tell you. If you came from the other village would you answer ‘no’ if I were to ask you whether you came from the liars’ village? By means of a double negative the liar is forced to tell the truth. This construction forces him to reveal his identity, you see. That’s what I call logic via argument to the truth!
Kaspar: Well, I know another question.
Logician: You do? There is no other question, by the laws of logic.
Nurse: There isn’t?
Kaspar: But I do know another question.
Logician: Let us hear it, then!
Kaspar: I should ask the man whether he was a tree-frog. The man from the truth village would say;
“No, I’m not a tree-frog”,because he tells the truth. The man from the liars’ village would say “Yes, I’m a tree-frog”, because he would tell a lie. So I know where he comes from.
Logician: No, that’s not a proper question. That won’t do, I can’t accept it as a question. That's not logic. Logic is a deduction, not description.
What you have done is describe something, not deduce it.But I understand his question. Understanding is secondary. The reasoning is the thing. In logic and mathematics we do not understand things.
We reason and deduce. I cannot accept that question.
As part of the ensemble of methods and purposes supporting the continuing Re:LODE projects, the scenario above presents a highly functional approach to the problem of ascertaining where the information and different sources of those telling lies originate, and those who are coming to us to share the results following on from the conducting of practical, critical and ethical research.
How to spot fake news
Here’s is the top of the list advice on how to spot a fake from FACTCHECK>ORG:
Consider the source.
In recent months, we’ve fact-checked fake news from abcnews.com.co (not the actual URL for ABC News), WTOE 5 News (whose “about” page says it’s “a fantasy news website”), and the Boston Tribune (whose “contact us” page lists only a gmail address). Earlier this year, we debunked the claim that the Obamas were buying a vacation home in Dubai, a made-up missive that came from WhatDoesItMean.com, which describes itself as “One Of The Top Ranked Websites In The World for New World Order, Conspiracy Theories and Alternative News” and further says on its site that most of what it publishes is fiction.
Clearly, some of these sites do provide a “fantasy news” or satire warning, like WTOE 5, which published the bogus headline, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” Others aren’t so upfront, like the Boston Tribune, which doesn’t provide any information on its mission, staff members or physical location — further signs that maybe this site isn’t a legitimate news organization. The site, in fact, changed its name from Associated Media Coverage, after its work had been debunked by fact-checking organizations.
Snopes.com, which has been writing about viral claims and online rumors since the mid-1990s, maintains a list of known fake news websites, several of which have emerged in the past two years.
Snopes list of known fake news websites.
So, what about FACTCHECK and Snopes?
Where does the information come from? The village of lies, or the village of truth?
Wikipedia says:
FactCheck.org is a nonprofit website that describes itself as a "consumer advocate for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics". It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation. FactCheck.org has won four Webby Awards in the Politics category, in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012.
Most of its content consists of rebuttals to what it considers inaccurate, misleading, or false claims made by politicians. FactCheck.org has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups. Other features include:
- Ask FactCheck: users can ask questions that are usually based on an online rumor.
- Viral Spiral: a page dedicated to the most popular online myths that the site has debunked. It clarifies the answer as well as links readers to a full article on the subject.
- Party Lines: talking points that have been repeatedly used by multiple members of a political party.
- Mailbag: page for readers' sent letters and praise or disapproval of something said on the site.
Further advice on the FactCheck webpage includes:
Read beyond the headline.
If a provocative headline drew your attention, read a little further before you decide to pass along the shocking information.
Check the author.
Another tell-tale sign of a fake story is often the byline.
What’s the support?
Many times these bogus stories will cite official — or official-sounding — sources, but once you look into it, the source doesn’t back up the claim.
Check the date.
Some false stories aren’t completely fake, but rather distortions of real events. These mendacious claims can take a legitimate news story and twist what it says — or even claim that something that happened long ago is related to current events.
Is this some kind of joke?
Remember, there is such thing as satire. Normally, it’s clearly labeled as such, and sometimes it’s even funny. Andy Borowitz has been writing a satirical news column, the Borowitz Report, since 2001, and it has appeared in the New Yorker since 2012. But not everyone gets the jokes. FactCheck say they have fielded several questions on whether Borowitz’s work is true.
Among the headlines FactCheck readers have flagged: “Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies” and “Trump Threatens to Skip Remaining Debates If Hillary Is There.” When we told readers these were satirical columns, some indicated that they suspected the details were far-fetched but wanted to be sure.
And then there’s the more debatable forms of satire, designed to pull one over on the reader. That “Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin” story? That’s the work of online hoaxer Paul Horner, whose “greatest coup,” as described by the Washington Post in 2014, was when Fox News mentioned, as fact, a fake piece titled, “Obama uses own money to open Muslim museum amid government shutdown."
Horner told the Post after the election that he was concerned his hoaxes aimed at Trump supporters may have helped the campaign.
The posts by Horner and others — whether termed satire or simply “fake news” — are designed to encourage clicks, and generate money for the creator through ad revenue. Horner told the Washington Post he makes a living off his posts. Asked why his material gets so many views, Horner responded:
“They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.”
Check your biases.
FactCheck acknowledges that this is a difficult one!
Confirmation bias leads people to put more stock in information that confirms their beliefs and discount information that doesn’t. But the next time you’re automatically appalled at some Facebook post concerning, say, a politician you oppose, take a moment to check it out.
Confirmation bias and the LODE and Re:LODE project
Confirmation bias, and the struggle for a developing knowledge of the actual world, is at the heart of the LODE and Re:LODE project, and was so right from the beginning. What does the news on the TV screen or the news on laptop or mobile phone actually reveal to us about contemporary reality? In 1992 the LODE project was an opportunity, coupled with an artistic activity, to describe some places on a line that "girds the planet". In a way LODE was an experiment in seeing and describing the world through images and objects, and testing to see if it is possible to describe the world with images and things by creating contexts of information.
Travel, not books
Curiosity about places as yet identified was, and obviously within particular limits, testing how specific images and things might expose what is going on "behind our eyes" as well as what is happening in the world. In other words, looking at the ideologies and assumptions that we use, and mostly unconsciously, to describe the world, trying to see what is involved in a matrix that includes technology as much as our senses, and that shapes the pattern of perceptions that may, or may not, result in representations that begin in any process of that involves describing the way things are.
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is (according to Wikipedia) the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
Confirmation biases are effects in information processing, according to this Wikipedia article, and linked to a Wikipedia article on information processing theory.
The LODE project back in 1992, explicitly invoked the notion of an artistic project that purposefully sought to create a "space" where audience considers withdrawing the psychological projections that contribute to the way we see the world, and to accept that seeing the world is as much about interpreting the information as it is about processing perceptual sense data.
Psychological projection is generally understood as a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities, but for the LODE project the term was used primarily to point to the way we generally are seeing the world is shaped by pre-conceptions, assumptions and imaginings. Imaginings are not necessarily a problem. In creative activity in our everyday life, imagination is how we are able to empathize with another, to solve a problem, to step out of our bubble and encounter the different, the strange and the real. The problem is not knowing we are in our "bubble". It may be "our bubble", but it was not entirely of "our making". This is why the invisibility of any cultural and information environment is so potentially problematic. Being immersed in any such an environment results in a sort of "blindness" that supports an illusion of the world, coherent, believable, authentic, so that it appears as we expect it to be, not what it actually is.
This is where the art of description becomes a possible way out of the bubble. The development of optics in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe provides examples of different practical and psychological approaches and responses.
In the 1983 University of Chicago Press publication on Dutch art in the seventeenth century, The Art of Describing, the author Svetlana Alpers makes a vividly argued thesis, according to the reviewer George Steiner:
There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a ’textual culture,’ this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to ’read’ a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly ’visual culture.’ It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not ’read’ but ’seen,’ in which new knowledge is visually recorded." George Steiner, The Sunday Times.And, in the context of the emergence of the optics of telescope and microscope, this dichotomy, this difference, between the southern and northern European approach and response to these technologies is instructive.
South of the European Alps the vision produced by the glass lens of a microscope provoked a revulsion of the demons and monsters of the microverse, whilst the "heavenly junkyard" revealed by Galileo's telescopic lenses, could only be denied, suppressed, dismissed, by the powers that were.
In McLuhan and Parker's Through the Vanishing Point they write:
"If the telescope of Galileo had revealed the heavens as a kind of junkyard, in lieu of the crystalline spheres, there was also a dismay because of the absence of any sublime astral music. Instead of the heavenly symphony, the heavens were revealed as an area of ghastly silence: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me' says Pascal. Both the visual and auditory order seemed to be denied by the new astronomy" (p. 29).
Institutional, cultural, social, political, philosophical and religious cognitive dissonance!
This is perhaps an example of what is termed, in the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance. This refers to the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. This discomfort is triggered by a situation in which a person’s belief clashes with new evidence perceived by that person. When confronted with facts that contradict personal beliefs, ideals, and values, people will find a way to resolve the contradiction in order to reduce their discomfort.
In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency in order to mentally function in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, and so is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance, by making changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance, or by actively avoiding social situations and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance.
The powers in the Vatican chose a simple strategy - accuse Galileo of being a heretic.
E pur si muove ("And yet it moves")
This is a phrase attributed to the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in 1633 after being forced to recant his claims that the Earth moves around the immovable Sun rather than the converse during the Galileo affair.
In this context, the implication of the phrase is: despite his recantation, the Church's proclamations to the contrary, or any other conviction or doctrine of men, the Earth does, in fact, move (around the Sun, and not vice versa). As such, the phrase is used today as a sort of pithy retort implying that;
"it doesn't matter what you believe; these are the facts."
In the northerly regions of Europe, such visual information provided a challenge to artistic, philosophical and practical possibilities, and as Steiner says:
The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly ’visual culture.’ It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not ’read’ but ’seen,’ in which new knowledge is visually recorded."Micrographia
Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. is a historically significant book by Robert Hooke about his observations through various lenses. It is particularly notable for being the first book to illustrate insects, plants etc. as seen through microscopes. Published in January 1665, the first major publication of the Royal Society, it became the first scientific best-seller[citation needed], inspiring a wide public interest in the new science of microscopy. It is also notable for coining the biological term cell.
Hooke most famously describes a fly's eye and a plant cell (where he coined that term because plant cells, which are walled, reminded him of the cells in a honeycomb.
Inside/interior - Outside/exterior
There have been reversals, flips and changes of scale, but in the cultural history of optics and 'visual culture' there are some 'fearful symmetries'.
Actually, there is no inside or outside. Interior space and exterior space are concepts, ideas. What we call inside and outside, is, when all is said and done, space/time!
There are architectures that frame drama, out there, on the stage. The Italian Renaissance was like that, painting, drama and literature was spatially structured, actually as well as metaphorically, so that where the climax happened was always out there, on the stage, within the frame, and there was always this necessary distance, an essential distance vital to the creation of an illusion that something was happening for an audience of spectators. Visual spectacle comes from this. Watching a car crash from a distance, or in slow motion, is the difference necessary to transform a nightmare experience into a work of art
There are other, architectures that simply embrace the meeting of the sky, the heavens, be they blue or black, both night and day, and the earth. Where we are standing. This planet.
Paul Virilio, introduces his theme in The Information Bomb by making a connection between “the establishment of the space of virtual reality” and contemporary sciences that “are engaging, a contrario, in the eclipsing of the real, in the aesthetics of scientific disappearance” (Virilio 2005 p3). Chapter 1 begins with a question “The civilianization or militarization of science?” (Virilio 2005 p1) and even before that in the front papers he uses a quote from Werner Heisenberg to set the tone “No one can say what will be ‘real’ for people when the wars that are now beginning come to an end.”
For Virilio, the virtual is one of the products of an “extreme science”, which is in a way reminiscent of Nietzsche’s challenge to science. For Nietzsche science as an “absolute value”, as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake makes as little sense as the pursuit of goodness for its own sake, and can become just as harmful. If we ask “goodness for what purpose?”, so we must also insist on knowledge for what purpose?
As the tragic phenomenon of a knowledge which has suddenly become cybernetic, this techno-science becomes then, as mass techno-culture, the agent not, as in the past, of the acceleration of history, but of the dizzying whirl of the acceleration of reality – and that to the detriment of all verisimilitude. (Virilio 2005 p3)It is optics, and what Virilio calls electro-optics, that have contributed to this speeding up of “the various means for the representation of the world”. The choice, he says, is between a “science of verisimilitude, of the plausible, still attached to the discovery of a relative truth? Or, a science of implausibility, committed today to the research of a heightened virtual reality. (Virilio 2005 p3-4)
Heightened in what way? In what sense?
The world of visual appearances, or the world of the non-visible?
the audible?
the tactile?
the texture and feel of word-music?
Maybe this technoculture is actually running at another speed, the speed of everyday life, cognitive activities, nervous systems, where the richness of texture is experienced best when everything slows down to an extended time in multiple spaces. Perhaps this proposal is counter-intuitive to the time space compression Virilio is so anxious to critique, but it is where this project, and the useful theory that supports it all, chooses to begin.
“The time of the finite world is coming to an end” says Paul Virilio.
“How are we to conceive the change wrought by computerization if we remain tied to an ideological approach”, the ideology of globalization, that is, “when the urgent need is in fact for a new geostrategic approach to discover the scale of the phenomenon that is upon us?”This meta-geophysical phenomenon is, he says, is of “transpolitical importance”. We are not seeing ‘an end of history’, he says, but we are seeing the end of geography, and we are also witnessing a strange reversal in the meaning of the global and the local. He refers to the view the Pentagon developed in the 1990’s that;
We need to “come back to the Earth”, he says, “to its dimensions and to the coming loss of those dimensions in the acceleration not now of history (which, with the loss of local time, has just lost its concrete foundations), but of reality itself, with the new-found importance of this world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances – the reality of those geographical intervals which only yesterday still organized the politics of nations".
The abolition or dissolution of the geophysical space by a quasi-instantaneous global communication system means the continents themselves have been supplanted by tele-continents. In the context of this meta-geophysics, national frontiers dissolve, or are snatched away, as is the history of societies previously separated by “communications distances and time-lags”.
"geostrategy is turning the globe inside out like a glove".According to this weird military perspective the global is the interior of a finite world, and the local is the exterior “the periphery, if not indeed the ‘outer suburbs’ of the world”.
In Alper's book The Art of Describing the term chorography is mentioned in relation to one of the main themes for her study of Dutch painting in the 17th century, what she calls the "mapping impulse".
This "interior space" we see represented includes this map with layers of spatial information, including the North Sea, ships at sea, and all of this is bordered by rows of cities, and their landscapes, piling up one upon the other, like the sails of ships in their harbours.
The artist and the model for the 'muse' are set against this background, that includes a brushmark or two where we might look for Delft on this map.
Portrayals of scientists were a favourite topic in 17th-century Dutch painting and Vermeer's oeuvre includes both this astronomer and the slightly later The Geographer. Both are believed to portray the same man, possibly Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.
The astronomer's profession is shown by the celestial globe (version by Jodocus Hondius) and the book on the table, the 1621 edition of Adriaan Metius's Institutiones Astronomicae Geographicae. Symbolically, the volume is open to Book III, a section advising the astronomer to seek "inspiration from God" and the painting on the wall shows the Finding of Moses—Moses may represent knowledge and science ("learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians").
The Geographer is now in the collection of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut museum in Frankfurt, Germany. The geographer, dressed in a Japanese-style robe then popular among scholars, is shown to be "someone excited by intellectual inquiry", with his active stance, the presence of maps, charts, a globe and books, as well as the dividers he holds in his right hand.
Chorography (from χῶρος khōros; "place" + γράφειν graphein, "writing") is a term deriving from the writings of the ancient geographer Ptolemy. In his text of the Geographia Ptolemy writes that geography is the study of the entire world or large sections or countries of it, while chorography is the study of its smaller parts—provinces, regions, cities, or ports, in other words the local - local. Coming home presents us with the challenge to map our own experience, to share our own knowledge. "Ptolemy would include the making of images, views (not simply maps of small regions) in this category, since he claims that chorography requires the skills of a draftsman or artist rather than those of a scientist, which are needed for the practice of geography". Now it seems that the skills of a scientist need to be available to the artist in order to present a useful picture of the world to anyone interested. Wikipedia says that the "term chorography fell out of use after the Renaissance as city views and city maps became more and more sophisticated and demanded a set of skills that required not only skilled draftsmanship but also some knowledge of scientific surveying." However, Alpers work ably shows how artists took on and adapted this type of knowledge to the representation of spaces within spaces represented. Vermeer to eternity! Now, let us acknowledge that the capabilities of those involved in creative practices today are likely to prove as effectual as the work of human geographers when it comes to the construction and presentation of city views, and maybe a new type of artistic surveying capable of providing a complementary toolkit to the skills of the scientist.
Chorography, a writing about place, is also related to Chorology (from Greek χῶρος, khōros, "place, space"; and -λογία, -logia) a term used to describe the study of the causal relations between geographical phenomena occurring within a particular region. Significant in the historical use of this term was the German geographer Alfred Hettner (1859-1941);
a pupil of Richthofen and Ratzel. According to him, geography is a chorological science or it is a study of regions. Hettner rejected the view that geography could be either general or regional. Geography like other fields of learning,must deal in both the unique things (regional geography) and with universal (general geography), but the study of regions is the main field of geography.The term was used by Strabo (Στράβων; 63/64 BC – ca. AD 24) in his 17-volume work Geographica, which presented a descriptive history of people and places from different regions of the world known to his era. So, we find ourselves returning to regionalism, art and human geography. Surely the active research and presentation by artists located in places and discovering and describing their own territories rather than exercising the projecting of unconscious needs and expressions of power relations onto other places is a possible answer to the question of just what is the artistic function in societies amongst the different regions of the world. As Hettner says and is quoted:
The goal of the chorological point of view is to know the character of regions and places through comprehension of the existence together and interrelations among different realms of reality and their varied manifestations, and to comprehend the earth surface as a whole in its actual arrangement in continents, larger and smaller regions, and places.Coming home, virtually/actually, is about expressing out of knowledge the most difficult of things, our own characteristics. What kind of artists are we? What kind of art? The world is a verb and the surface of the earth a life's work of discovery.
Imagining imagination!
There is a link on the Psychological Projection article to a prominent precursor in the formulation of the projection principle, one Giambattista Vico.
Vico was an eighteenth century Italian political philosopher and rhetorician, historian and jurist, of the Age of Enlightenment.
He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, was an apologist for Classical Antiquity, a precursor of systematic and complex thought, in opposition to Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism, and was the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics.
The Latin aphorism:
Verum esse ipsum factum ("What is true is precisely what is made")
was coined by Vico, and is an early instance of constructivist epistemology.
He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history, and, although the term philosophy of history is not in his writings, Vico spoke of a “history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he was not an historicist, contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin, an historian of ideas, Edward Said, a literary critic, and Hayden White, a metahistorian.
Giambattista Vico's intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova (1725, New Science), which attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that recorded and explained the historical cycles by which societies rise and fall.
Vico was born, educated, and spent his working and intellectual life in Naples, part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in his day, a region considered as a cultural backwater, and well south of the European Alps, but nevertheless a place that was good enough from which to critique the Cartesian analysis and philosophic approach that had gained sway in the Netherlands.
Isaiah Berlin's introduction to his book Vico and Herder, first published in 1976, says of Vico's ideas:
What, then, may it be asked, are these time-defying notions?He then sets out his answer in seven theses. In summary, Berlin's take is as follows:
Firstly, that the nature of human beings is not static and unalterable. That humans own efforts to understand the world in which they find themselves and to adapt it to their needs, physical and spiritual, continuously transform their worlds and themselves.
Secondly, that those who make or create something can understand it is as mere observers of it cannot.
Thirdly, that people's knowledge of the external world, which can be observed, described, classified, reflected upon, and that the regularities in time and space can be recorded, differs in principle from their knowledge of the world that they themselves create, and which obeys rules that they have themselves imposed on their own creations. Examples include mathematics, a human invention, and language, which people, not the forces of nature, have shaped. So, all human activities, inasmuch as it is humans that are the makers, involve people as both actors and observers. History, since it is concerned with human action, can be known from the "inside", a superior knowledge, but for which our knowledge of the external world cannot possibly be the paradigm and therefore a matter about which the Cartesians, for whom natural knowledge is the model, must therefore be in error.
"This is the ground of the sharp division drawn by Vico between the natural sciences and the humanities, between self-understanding on the one hand, and the observation of the external world on the other."Fourthly, that there is a pervasive pattern which characterizes all the activities of any given society: a common style reflected in the thought, the arts, the social institutions, the language, the ways of life and action, of an entire society.
"This idea is tantamount to the concept of a culture; not necessarily of one culture, but of many; with the corollary that true understanding of human history cannot be achieved without the recognition of a succession of the phases of the culture of a given society or people."Fifthly, that the creations of human activity - laws, institutions, religions, rituals, works of art, language, song, rules of conduct and the like - are not artificial products created to please, or, to exalt, or teach wisdom, but are natural forms of self-expression, of communication with other human beings. The myths and fables of the human past were not the absurd fantasies or the deliberate inventions designed to delude the masses, as many of his contemporaries thought. For Vico, myths and fables and ritual are so many natural ways of conveying a coherent view of the world as it was seen and interpreted.
"To understand the history of peoples, one needs to understand what they lived by, which can be discovered only by those who have the key to what their language, art, ritual mean - a key which Vico's New Science was intended to provide."
From which it follows, sixthly, that works of art must be understood, interpreted, evaluated, not in terms of timeless principles and standards, but by correct grasp of the purpose and therefore the peculiar use of symbols, especially of language, which belong uniquely to their own time and place, their own stage of social growth.
"This marks the beginning of comparative cultural history, indeed, of a cluster of new historical disciplines: comparative anthropology and sociology, comparative law, linguistics, ethnology, religion, literature, the history of art, of ideas, of institutions, of civilisations - indeed the entire field of knowledge of what came to be called the social sciences in the widest sense, conceived in historical, that is, genetic terms."Isaiah Berlin's seventh thesis on Vico's time-defying notions is that, following on from what is, in effect the new type of aesthetics he proposes for understanding and interpreting the results of human creative activity, including works of art, that in addition to the traditional categories of knowledge there must be added a new variety.
To the traditional categories of knowledge - a priori-deductive, a posteriori- empirical, that provided by sense perception and that vouchsafed by revelation - there must be added the reconstructive imagination.
This type of knowledge is yielded by 'entering' into the mental life of other cultures, into a variety of outlooks and ways of life which only the activity of fantasia - imagination - makes possible.
"Fantasia is for Vico a way of conceiving the process of social change and growth by correlating it with, indeed, viewing it as conveyed by, the parallel change or development of the symbolism by which men seek to express it; since the symbolic structures are themselves part and parcel of the reality which they symbolize, and alter with it."This method of discovery which begins with understanding the means of expression, and seeks to reach the vision of reality which they presuppose and articulate, is a kind of;
"transcendental deduction of historical truth."
Through imagination we build things acting as they were abstractions, and build abstractions acting as they were real things.
Imagination and its opposite - "fantasy"!
