John Dunn

Bridge from Coleridge to Gentile

Friday, 6 June 2025 at 22:31

Giovanni Gentile

Bridge from Coleridge to Gentile

If Coleridge warmed to the principles of active self-creation laid down by Vico, then it should not be surprising either that the Italian political philosopher Vico was an influence upon the Italian philosopher of action par excellence, Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). About Gentile’s response to Vico, William Smith wrote:

Vico, according to Gentile, taught that we can know an object when the object is neither found nor discovered by our thought as existing before we began to know.Vico must have seen, therefore, that knowing is resolving an object into one’s spiritual activity. Truth, then, involves a making, a creative activity. In this Vico anticipated Kant and Hegel.

With regard to the deity, Gentile aligned Vico with St. Paul and St. Augustine and their view on the presence of God in the world. Gentile states that in these men it is evident that ‘we have that immanence of the divine in the mind of man, which we see in the doctrine of providence in Vico’.

If a shared affinity to Vico offers a bridge from Coleridge to Gentile, then so too does a clear anti-Spinozism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Affinity to Vico

Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 22:03

Giambattista Vico

Affinity to Vico

When Coleridge first read the Autobiography and Scienza Nuovaby Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) his response was quick, hospitable and incisive. In a letter dated 16th may 1825, he wrote:

I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere’. (‘May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.’)

Coleridge was referring to Vico’s masterpiece La Scienza Nuova,which he read in Italian, using the edition published in Milan in 1816.Vico’s central principle was the idea that human nature is not ever the same: static and unalterable, with a central kernel. Rather, Vico’s motto was - ‘humanity is its own creation’. This central principle led him to a new type of aesthetics, not based on universal norms, but on the uniqueness of each individual culture or civilisation. To the traditional types of knowledge, a priori, deductive, a posteriori, empirical, the products of sense-perception and revelation, there had tobe added that of the reconstructive imagination. Even if Coleridge discovered Vico too late for him to be a defining influence upon his own work, he did feel an affinity to Vico’s emphasis upon the creative imagination and the notion of humanity being active in ‘its own creation’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.